Apple Unveils the M2 Ultra: The Most Powerful Chip Ever for a PC

Apple has unveiled the giant M2 Ultra, which will now be equipped with Apple silicon, making the entire Mac portfolio run on its own chips. The M2 Ultra is a combination of two M2 Max chips that are joined together based on Apple’s UltraFusion technology. This means that it can contain up to 192 GB of memory and has a bandwidth for this memory of 800 GB/s. These are respectively 50 percent and 100 percent more than we saw with the M1 Ultra. Compared to that chip, the CPU part should be 20 percent faster, the larger GPU outperforms the old one by 30 percent, and the Neural Engine for AI workloads is up to 40 percent more powerful.
The promise here is that the M2 Ultra would be the fastest chip ever for a PC. With the great feedback based on the M1 and the somewhat less spectacular response on the M2, it remains to be seen how the Ultra lands. These specifications do promise a huge leap forward. For Apple, it will have been especially important to finally get rid of Intel-based options in the higher segment. After all, these will be a lot more lucrative with their own hardware on board.

Powerful Specs

The M2 Ultra contains 24 CPU cores, while the GPU can be equipped with 60 or 76 cores. We should always be careful with conclusions based on numbers like this, because the IPC (instructions-per-clock) doesn’t necessarily scale with core counts or frequency. It does mean that there is no longer an option to equip the Mac Pro with a dedicated GPU, something that Nvidia will not be too happy about.

Server Usage

The M2 Ultra appears in the new Mac Studio and Mac Pro. The latter product can be supplied in both desktop and server rack form. In combination with the extensive PCIe compatibility, it means that server usage is made more realistic. The Linux implementation on Apple silicon isn’t as easy to set up as we’d like, but with these specs it would be a shame if this use case isn’t taken up further.