Apple’s Mac Studio is Being Refreshed With M5 Ultra and M5 Max Chips

Apple unveiled today a refreshed Mac Studio with faster M5 Max and M5 Ultra chips alongside its new Mac mini with M6 and M5 Pro chips. Apple’s most powerful desktop Mac recently saw its base price increase to $2,499 due to the ongoing memory and storage crisis, and the good news is that the price of the new M5 Max version isn’t changing. However, the Mac Studio with M5 Ultra now starts at $5,499, up from $5,299 for the M3 Ultra version.

Let’s start with the Mac Studio with M5 Max, a chip that Apple previously made available on its latest 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros. Compared to the previous M4 Max chip, the M5 Max comes with 18 CPU cores (up from 14), up to 40 GPU cores with neural accelerators, up to 128GB of memory with up to 614GB/s of memory bandwifth, up to 8TB of storage, and a 16-core neural engine.

“The up-to-40-core GPU with Neural Accelerators is now up to 50 percent faster than the previous generation, boosting graphics-intensive tasks like game development with higher frame rates and more complex scene geometry,” Apple said today. “With up to 614GB/s of unified memory bandwidth, M5 Max delivers superfast on-device AI compute, enabling users to run LLMs, generate images and video, as well as accelerate complex workflows.”

As I mentioned previously, the Mac Studio with M5 Max starts at $2,499 for the model with a chip with 18 CPU cores, 32 GPU cores, 36GB of unified memory, and 512GB of storage. However, power users may prefer the Mac Studio with the brand new M5 Ultra chip, which is Apple’s most powerful chip ever.

The M5 Ultra uses Apple’s next-gen ‘UltraFusion’ technology to form a quad-die 3nm architecture, which is a first for the company. “UltraFusion increases the inter-die bandwidth to over 4.4TB/s and the connection density by over 6x. Together, these ultra-low-latency, high-bandwidth interconnects allow the four dies to behave as a single unified processor,” Apple explained today.

The M5 Ultra comes with up to 36 CPU cores, up to 80 GPU cores with neural accelerators, a 32-core neural engine (same as the M3 Ultra), up to 512GB of unified memory with up to 1.2TB/S of memory bandwidth (50% more than M3 Ultra), and up to 16TB of storage. Just like the M3 Ultra, the chip supports up to eight 4K displays, eight 6K displays, or four 8K displays.

“There is no other chip like M5 Ultra, which delivers the highest levels of performance and massive amounts of unified memory, enabling pros to push the limits of what they can accomplish on a single machine,” Apple said today. “Filmmakers can color-grade uncompressed 8K footage in real time, VFX artists can render complex simulations, and data scientists can train local AI models on expansive datasets.”

The Mac Studio with M5 Ultra starts at $5,499 for the model with a chip with 30 CPU cores, 64 GPU cores, 96GB of unified memory, and 1TB of storage. Pre-orders are now open, and shipments will start on September 22. However, Mac Studio models with 512GB of memory won’t become available until late October.