A big jump. Since Apple announced a couple of years ago that it was abandoning Intel processors for its line of computers and laptops (Mac), much has been said about what they could offer in terms of technology. silicone. Its first chips (M1 and M1X) made a good impression more for their smooth compatibility with iPad/iPhone than for their power. Now, Cupertino has surprised the whole world with the presentation of the new MacStudio and the M1 Ultraa real beast in terms of capacity.
YOU CAN SEE: Apple released its new iPhone SE: is it really worth buying in 2022?
Comparison of all the chips created by Apple since it abandoned the Intel standard. Photo: Apple
Contents
Apple M1 Ultra: the brand’s new flagship SoC
The new M1 Ultra was announced about the new MacStudio that Apple presented at its recent event on March 8, in which they also presented the new plans for almost their entire line of desktop and portability products (iPhone, iPad, MacBooks).
One of the strong points of the event was the MacStudioa kind of high-performance desktop proposal, but more compact than the current ones iMac and even those remembered powermac. This will have inside the new M1 Ultra chip, which will offer up to 3.8 times more performance than the current 27-inch iMac and 10-core processors.
The new Mac Studio. Photo: Apple
M1 Ultra: two chips
Johny Srouji, Apple’s vice president of hardware technologies, said the M1 Ultra “completely changes everything” when it comes to Apple’s silicon technology. According to his estimates, his premiere “will strongly impact the PC industry”.
The composition of the M1 Ultra consists of two M1 Max chips through the technology called “UltraFusion interprocessor interconnection”, which offers a speed of 2.5 terabytes per second as bandwidth. Considerably low latency.
This system uses a silicon buffer that has, according to Apple, twice the density and four times the bandwidth of other similar technologies. each chip M1Max has an area of 432 square millimeters, while the chip UltraFusion with 864 square millimeters. Something similar to what AMD and Nvidia offer in their GPUs with HBM (high bandwidth memory).
M1 Ultra – a dream for programmers
Of course, there have been many attempts at technologies that use the combined capabilities of two or more chips. The challenge for this type of proposal has always been the complexity in which it has resulted for developers (who have to write more instructions for the greater number of processors). Fortunately, for Apple, the benefit of UltraFusion is that no code rewrites will be required to use this standard in its full glory, since, at a system level, Macs will still detect the M1 Ultra SoC as a single processor.