Apple Debuts M6 And M5 Ultra Chips With Major AI Performance Gains

(RTTNews) - Apple Inc. (AAPL) has introduced its new M6 chip in the Mac mini and M5 Ultra in the Mac Studio, targeting users with demanding computing and artificial intelligence workloads.

The M6 is built on a 2-nanometer process and features a 12-core CPU, 12-core GPU with Neural Accelerators, a Dual 16-core Neural Engine and up to 170GB/s of unified memory bandwidth.

Apple said M6 delivers up to 1.2 times faster multithreaded performance than M5, while its GPU provides nearly 30 percent higher peak AI compute performance. The chip supports up to 32GB of unified memory and is designed to accelerate coding, creative work and on-device AI tasks.

Meanwhile, M5 Ultra uses Apple's UltraFusion technology to combine four dies into a single processor for the first time. It offers up to 36 CPU cores and 80 GPU cores, with up to 512GB of unified memory and 1.2TB/s of memory bandwidth.

Apple said M5 Ultra delivers up to 4.5 times the peak GPU AI compute of M3 Ultra and up to 40 percent faster graphics performance. The chip is designed to run large AI models, complex 3D workloads, scientific applications and high-resolution video production locally on Mac Studio.