Apple has launched the M5 Ultra, its fastest consumer processor yet, featured in the latest Mac Studio. The chip skips the M2 and M4 generations, arriving as the M5 Ultra due to the complexity of its dual-die design. The M5 Ultra introduces a groundbreaking quad-die architecture by fusing two dual-die M5 Max chips, a first for Apple silicon.

This design increases connection density sixfold and boosts interconnection speed to 4.4TB/s, up from 2.5TB/s on the M3 Ultra. The top M5 Ultra configuration offers up to 36 processing cores, including 12 performance and 24 efficiency cores, delivering up to 30 percent faster multithreaded performance. Both chips support 512GB of unified memory, but the M5 Ultra increases memory performance by 50 percent to 1.2TB/s.

For graphics, the M5 Ultra features redesigned GPU cores with a Neural Accelerator, offering up to 4.5 times faster AI compute. The updated Media Engine supports hardware-accelerated AV1 and Pro Res, enabling 33 streams of 8K video simultaneously. Apple also claims industry-leading energy efficiency and significant speedups in professional workloads, with up to 4.3x faster text-to-image performance and 4x faster LLM prompt processing compared to the M3 Ultra.