Apple Unveils M1 Ultra SOC: CPU Faster Than Intel 12900K at 100W Less Power, GPU On Par With NVIDIA RTX 3090 at 200W Less Power

Apple has just unveiled its flagship M1 SOC, the M1 Ultra, and provided some impressive metrics in regards to its CPU & GPU performance.

Apple M1 Ultra SOC Offers Faster CPU & GPU Performance Than Flagship Desktop Intel Alder Lake & NVIDIA RTX 3090 Chips While Consuming Lower Power

The Apple M1 Ultra SOC is the combination of two M1 Max chips using the brand new Apple UltraFusion architecture. The Ultra SOC still utilizes the 5nm process node but the doubling provides up to 114 Billion transistors on the same package. The new UltraFusion architecture delivers up to 2.5 TB/s of low-latency interprocessor bandwidth and 800 GB/s of fast memory bandwidth. The interconnect architecture features more than 10,000 signals between the two chips.

Apple M1 Ultra Chip Is Nearly 3 Times Bigger Than AMD’s Ryzen CPUs, Benchmarks Show Desktop Intel & AMD CPUs Still Ahead

A low-level view of the Apple M1 Ultra SOC reveals a 20-core CPU with 16 high-performance and 4 high-efficiency cores. Like the previous M1 chips, the high-performance cores are based on an ultra wide execution architecture with 192KB instruction cache, 128 KB data cache & 48 MB of L2 cache while the efficiency cores are based on a Wide Execution architecture with 128KB instruction cache, 64KB data cache and 8 MB of L2 cache. There are also 32 cores as a part of the M1 Neural Engine which provide up to 22 trillion operations per second.

The GPU also gets a huge bump with a 64-core unit that offers 8192 execution units for up to 21 TFLOPs of single-precision horsepower, 660 GTexels/s, and 330 GPixels/s. The media engine on the Apple M1 Ultra is composed of the latest Hardware-accelerated H.264, HEVC, ProRes & ProRes with 2 video decode engines, 4 videos encode engines and 4 ProRes encode/decode engines. The GPU is getting access to 128 GB of unified memory.

Apple M1 Ultra SOC CPU Performance (vs Intel Alder Lake):

Coming straight to the performance numbers on display, Apple has stated that the M1 Ultra can deliver up to 90% more performance than the flagship Intel Alder Lake Desktop CPU, the Core i9-12900K at the same wattage and similar performance while sipping in 100W less power. It is also stated that the chip offers 90% more performance than an Intel Xeon 16-core chip and 2.5x faster performance than a 10 core Intel Core i9 desktop CPU. The specific models for both chips weren't mentioned.

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Apple M1 Ultra SOC GPU Performance (vs NVIDIA/AMD GPUs):

The same is true for the GPU which offers the same performance as the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti at 1/3rd the power and similar performance to NVIDIA's flagship GeForce RTX 3090 graphics card while sipping in 200W less power. Apple also showed comparative numbers against the Radeon Pro W6900X on their existing Mac Pro solutions. The Mac Studio with M1 Ultra SOC offers up to 80% faster performance than the Radeon Pro solution.

Mac Studio Powered by M1 Ultra Enables:

Apple M1 Ultra SOC UltraFusion Chip-To-Chip Interconnect:

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