Apple announces M3 Ultra—and says not every generation will see an “Ultra” chip

Apple’s first Mac Studio refresh in nearly two years is a welcome update, injecting fresh life into two computers that were still getting by with M2 chips. But the company took a bit of a strange approach to the update, giving an M4-series Max chip to the lower-end Studio but an M3 Ultra chip to the high-end model. These processors are both performance upgrades from the M2 Max and M2 Ultra, and the M3 Ultra is so huge that it should have no trouble outrunning the M4 Max despite its slightly older CPU and GPU architecture. But it’s still a departure from past practice, where Apple would keep the Studio’s chip generation in lockstep. When asked why the high-end Mac Studio was getting an M3 Ultra chip instead of an M4 Ultra, Apple told us that not every chip generation will get an “Ultra” tier. This is, as far as I can recall, the first time that Apple has said anything like this in public. This statement doesn’t totally preclude the possibility of an eventual M4 Ultra—if Apple wanted to put more space in between the Mac Studio and the Mac Pro, reserving its best chip for the Mac Pro could be one way to do it. But it does suggest that Apple will skip the M4 Ultra entirely, opting to refresh these gigantic and niche chips on a slower cadence than the rest of its processors. And while an “M4 Ultra” has appeared in some rumors about the next-gen Mac Studio update, that processor’s core counts match up with what Apple announced as the M3 Ultra today.

Makeup of the M3 Ultra

The M3 Ultra is a pair of M3 Max chips joined together with a silicon interposer, an arrangement similar to what Apple did with the M1 Ultra and M2 Ultra. As such, everything is doubled: 32 CPU cores instead of 16, 80 GPU cores instead of 40, 32 Neural Engine cores instead of 16, and two ProRes video encoding engines instead of one. Apple has also added a couple of extras, getting the M3 Ultra certified for 120Gbps Thunderbolt 5 (the M3 Max supports Thunderbolt 4) and supporting up to 512GB of RAM (M3 Max tops out at 128GB). And for some new-to-Mac-Studio features like hardware-accelerated ray-tracing for graphics, the M3 and M4 GPUs both support the features. The existence of the M3 Ultra puts to rest some lightly sourced speculation from last year, suggesting that the M3 Max was shipping without the silicon used to fuse two Max chips together into a single Ultra chip. As for why Apple has decided that it doesn’t need an Ultra chip for every Apple Silicon generation, we can only speculate. But the Mac Studio has been around for a few years now, and Apple likely has a better sense of how the Max-versus-Ultra sales break down. It may simply be the case that the sales of the high-end Mac Studio and Mac Pro can’t justify the cost and effort needed to design and manufacture a new Ultra chip every time Apple wants to tweak its silicon.