🚀 Apple has announced the new M6 and M5 Ultra chips
🖥️ The processors are available in the new Mac Mini and Mac Studio
⚙️ The M6 has a 12-core CPU and 12-core GPU for faster graphics and power
🦾 The M5 Ultra is Apple’s most powerful chip it’s ever built
💰 Apple is hiking the price of both new Macs
📆 The new models are available starting today
Apple has announced two brand-new chips that make the Mac even more powerful. The new M6 and M5 Ultra deliver faster CPUs, faster graphics, and faster AI processing, just in time for Siri AI to debut in macOS 27 Golden Gate. The chips are coming first to the Mac mini and Mac Studio, which get higher starting prices as a result.
🧑💻 Apple M6: what’s new?
It’s no surprise that Apple’s new M6 chip delivers the fastest performance for a baseline Apple M-series chip ever. It’s 8x faster than the M1 that came out nearly six years ago, which is impressive progress. Here are the key upgrades Apple made to give it a huge boost in performance.
The M6 is built on a new 2-nanometer process that delivers better performance and efficiency than the M5.
The new Dual 16-core Neural Engine has 2x the peak AI compute of previous generations of Apple’s Neural Engine, which makes on-device AI processing faster than ever before.
It has a brand-new 12-core CPU (two more cores than M5) with 2 super cores, 4 performance cores, and 6 efficiency cores. Altogether, Apple says you’ll see up to 1.2x faster multithreaded performance compared to M5.
There’s also a new 12-core GPU (two more cores than M5) that delivers up to 30% better computing power for AI. It works with new updates to the shader core architecture, Dynamic Caching, and hardware-accelerated ray tracing.
In addition, the M6 supports up to 32GB of unified memory and up to 170GB/s of unified memory bandwidth (a 10% jump compared to M5).
🚀 Apple M5 Ultra: what’s new?
The most powerful chip Apple has ever shipped, the M5 Ultra is designed for professionals who need the most power they can get in a Mac. Here are the key upgrades Apple made that give it a big boost compared to the M3 Ultra.
There’s a new GPU that can be configured with up to a whopping 80 cores, with a Neural Accelerator in each core for up to 4.5x the peak GPU compute power for AI as M3 Ultra. it also gets Apple’s latest shader core with second-generation Dynamic Caching, hardware-accelerated mesh shading, and third-generation ray tracing.
It has a new Media Engine that gives video editors a big boost in performance, with dedicated hardware-enabled H.264, HEVC, four ProRes encode, and decode engines, and hardware-accelerated AV1 decode.
There’s a new 32-core Neural Engine that’s specificially designed for complex AI tasks and Apple Intelligence features.
You can configure it with a massive 512GB of unified memory, with 1.2TB/s of unified memory bandwidth (50% more than M3 Ultra).
🖥️ Where can you buy M6 and M5 Ultra?
Apple is offering the M6 and M5 Ultra in the new versions of the Mac mini and Mac Studio, available starting today for preorder from Apple’s website. Prices for the new models have gone up, however, with the base model of the Mac mini increasing by $100 compared to the previous version, while the Mac Studio goes up by $200.
The new M6-powered Mac mini starts at $899, while the M5 Ultra-equipped Mac Studio starts at $5,499.
Max Buondonno is an editor at The Shortcut and co-host of The Shortcut Live. He’s been reporting on the latest consumer technology since 2015, with his work featured on CNN Underscored, ZDNET, How-To Geek, XDA, TheStreet, and more. Follow him on X @LegendaryScoop and Instagram @LegendaryScoop.