Apple’s M1 Ultra tapes two M1 Max chips together

Apple is adding "one last chip" to the M1 processor family. The M1 Ultra is a new design that uses "UltraFusion" technology to strap two M1 Max chips together, resulting in a huge processor that offers 16 high-performance CPU cores, four efficiency cores, a 64-core integrated GPU, and support for up to 128GB of RAM.

It looks like Apple is using a chiplet-based design for the M1 Ultra, just like AMD is doing for many of its Ryzen chips. A chiplet-based approach, as we've written, uses multiple silicon dies to make larger chips and can result in better yields since you don't need to throw a whole monolithic 20-core chip out if a couple of cores have defects that keep them from working.

Like the other M1 chips, the M1 Ultra is manufactured on a 5 nm TSMC manufacturing process. If you want to know the chip's other key specs, simply double everything Apple is doing in the M1 Max—that means up to 800GB/s of memory bandwidth and a 32-core Neural Engine.

The M1 Ultra will power Apple's just-announced Mac Studio in its higher-end $3,999 configuration, which also includes 64GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD. We've got more details on the Studio in a separate post.

Listing image by Apple