After a flurry of rumors, the M2 Ultra is finally here and is found in Apple’s updated Mac Studio and newly announced workstation, the Mac Pro. Like the M2 Pro and M2 Max, the M2 Ultra is mass-produced on the 5nm process, and through a process called UltraFusion, Apple combined two M2 Max chipsets to create its most powerful SoC. Over here, we talk about all of its specifications and improvements that will enable power users to take advantage of it.

Apple claims the M2 Ultra is 40 percent faster than the M1 Ultra in machine-learning capabilities

With 134 billion transistors, the M2 Ultra has 20 billion additional transistors than the M1 Ultra and can be configured with up to a 24-core CPU, out of which the 16 cores are focused on performance, while the remaining eight are focused on power efficiency. The chipset can also be configured with up to 60 or 76 GPU cores, meaning that the M2 Ultra touts 12 extra GPU cores compared to the M1 Ultra. The custom silicon also supports 192GB of unified RAM with a memory bandwidth of 800GB/s, which is twice that of the M2 Max.

Using a process called UltraFusion, Apple combined two M2 Max chipsets to make the M2 Ultra

Coming to the Neural Engine, there are 32 cores, delivering 31.6 trillion operations per second, making it 40 percent faster than the M1 Ultra. Since the M2 Ultra is primarily focused on creative professionals, many improvements are added to cater to this audience. Firstly, the M2 Ultra has twice the capabilities of the M2 Max with its powerful media engine, and it can play back 22 streams of 8K ProRes 422 video and support up to six Pro Display XDR monitors.

With the launch of the Mac Pro and M2 Ultra, the Apple Silicon transition has been successful

Compared to the M1 Ultra, the M2 Ultra has a 20 percent faster CPU and a 30 percent GPU. When featured inside the Mac Studio, DaVinci Resolve can deliver up to 50 percent faster video processing compared to the M1 Ultra. In pure 3D rendering performance, using Octane on the Mac Studio is up to 300 percent faster with Apple’s most powerful chipset. It should also be noted that with the latest announcement and with the launch of the Mac Pro, the Apple Silicon transition is finally complete, and the only thing that remains is the launch of faster and more efficient versions, such as the M3.

The M2 Ultra has the capability to drive multiple high-resolution monitors, improving productivity for power users

Like the M2 Pro and M2 Max, the M2 Ultra is an iterative update over the M1 Ultra, and we will likely see nominal performance gains in both single-core and multi-core performance. It is only after the launch of the M3, in which Apple is to transition to TSMC’s 3nm process, would see some noteworthy differences. As always, we will have benchmarks and comparisons in the coming days, so stay tuned.