Apple has announced the 2nm M6 and 4-die M5 Ultra. They will be available in the Mac mini and Mac Studio, with pre-orders beginning 25 August and sales starting 22 September.
Apple has announced the next-generation M6, which will be available in the Mac mini, while the 4-die M5 Ultra will be available in the Mac Studio. The company also announced the pre-order and release dates for the M6 and M5 Ultra.
The M6 features a 12-core CPU consisting of 2 super cores, 4 performance cores and 6 efficiency cores. Its 12-core GPU integrates a Neural Accelerator into each core, and Apple claims improvements in single-thread performance and gains in multithreaded performance over the previous generation. Memory is available in capacities of up to 32GB, with bandwidth of up to 170GB/s, and the chip newly features a dual 16-core Neural Engine.
The M5 Ultra uses a 4-die design connecting two dual-die M5 Max configurations, with inter-die bandwidth of more than 4.4TB/s and more than six times the connection density. It features up to a 36-core CPU, an 80-core GPU and a 32-core Neural Engine, with up to 512GB of memory and 1.2TB/s of memory bandwidth.
The Mac mini is available with the M6 and delivers improved AI performance over the previous generation. Standard memory is 16GB, with options of up to 32GB. Selecting the M5 Pro provides up to an 18-core CPU, 20-core GPU, 64GB of memory and 307GB/s of memory bandwidth, among other specifications, and results in different Thunderbolt configurations.
The Mac Studio is available with the M5 Max and M5 Ultra and supports Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6. The rear panel includes 4 Thunderbolt 5 ports, 10Gb Ethernet and HDMI, among other connections. It supports connection of up to 8 external displays with the M5 Ultra or up to 5 with the M5 Max, and can also be used in clusters.