At its Peek Performance event earlier this evening, Apple debuted the latest and potential final addition to its M1 lineup of silicon with the M1 Ultra. This follows on from the M1 Pro and Max that the company revealed alongside new MacBook Pros.

Explaining that the M1 Ultra features a new fusion architecture, Apple was ostensibly able to connect two M1 Max dies together in order to create the Ultra.

“To build M1 Ultra, the die of two M1 Max are connected using UltraFusion, Apple’s custom-built packaging architecture,” the company noted in the announcement.

“Apple’s innovative UltraFusion uses a silicon interposer that connects the chips across more than 10,000 signals, providing a massive 2.5TB/s of low latency, inter-processor bandwidth — more than 4x the bandwidth of the leading multi-chip interconnect technology,” it adds.

The result is the most powerful silicon that the company has created to date, which may be a short period of time given how long its foundry has been up and running, but remains impressive given what it has done so far with the M1 chips.

In terms of the makeup of this new chipset, it comprises a 20-core CPU with 16 high-performance cores and four high-efficiency cores, along with a 64-core GPU that is eight times the size of the M1.

Added to this is a 32-core Neural Engine that can run up to 22 trillion operations per second. As such, Apple will likely be aiming the M1 Ultra-laiden hardware at developers, designers, engineers and scientists.

To that end, it also showcased two new devices for that segment in the form of the Mac Studio and Studio Display. Both devices are designed to work in tandem in a studio setup, with either an M1 Max or M1 Ultra specification available.

Like the other hardware revealed this evening, pre-orders for the M1 Ultra-powered Mac Studio and the 27″ 5K Retina Studio Display start at $3 999 and $1 599 respectively. We will need to wait to see what that translates to for those in South Africa.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvX1WkFFtQI