M3 Ultra Launched: Apples Most Powerful and Advanced Processor

Alongside the new MacBook Air line with the M4 chip, Apple has officially introduced the M3 Ultra, its most powerful and advanced processor to date. Apple confidently asserts that the M3 Ultra is designed to meet the needs of professional users and those who need high performance.

At the heart of the M3 Ultra is a scalable system-on-chip (SoC) architecture that delivers exceptional performance and energy efficiency. The M3 Ultra is essentially two M3 Max chips, linked together via more than 10,000 high-speed connections. This creates a “super chip” with low latency, massive bandwidth (2.5TB/s), and is recognized by the operating system as a single chip. With a 32-core CPU, this flagship chip can deliver 1.5x more performance than the previous generation M2 Ultra and 1.8x more than the M1 Ultra.

The M3 Ultra’s 80-core graphics processor takes the newly announced Mac Studio to a new level of performance. With 2x the processing power of the M2 Ultra and 2.6x the M1 Ultra, the GPU can handle a wide range of performance-intensive tasks like content creation, 3D rendering, and gaming.

The M3 Ultra also supports current “trendy” technologies such as Dynamic Caching, high-speed hardware ray tracing and mesh shading, providing a realistic and smooth graphics experience, especially in 3D applications and games.

Mac Studio with M3 Ultra features up to 512GB of unified RAM, perfect for memory-intensive workflows like 3D rendering, visual effects, and AI development. Notable improvements in M3 Ultra include:

• UltraFusion Packaging Technology: Uses an embedded silicon pad to connect two M3 Max chips with over 10,000 signals, providing up to 2.5TB/s of inter-core bandwidth with low latency, making the M3 Ultra appear as a single chip to software.
• Media Engine: With twice the resources of the M3 Max, the media engine in the M3 Ultra is capable of much higher simultaneous video processing. The processor is capable of encoding and decoding H.264, HEVC, and four dedicated ProRes, allowing the M3 Ultra to play back up to 22 streams of 8K ProRes 422 video.
• Display Engine: M3 Ultra supports up to eight Pro Display XDR monitors, driving over 160 million pixels.
• Security: Secure Enclave combines hardware-verified secure boot and runtime anti-exploit technology to provide state-of-the-art security.
• Thanks to Thunderbolt 5 support at 120Gbps, the M3 Ultra is also capable of working with up to eight Pro Display XDR displays and playing back 22 streams of 8K ProRes 422 video.

AI capabilities cannot be ignored. The M3 Ultra is specifically designed to be optimized for AI and machine learning tasks. With a 32-core Neural Engine, over 800GB/s of memory bandwidth, and machine learning accelerators built into the CPU and GPU, the M3 Ultra allows AI experts to run large language models (LLMs) with over 600 billion parameters directly on the device.

Currently, the M3 Ultra is only available in the new Mac Studio starting at $3,999. Shipping begins March 12, 2025.