Apple today announced new Mac Studio models with the M5 Max and M5 Ultra chips, the latter being the company's most powerful chip ever. The new Mac Studio features a next-generation SSD architecture built on PCIe Gen 6 that Apple says is up to twice as fast as before. The machine also gains Thunderbolt 5 ports with up to 120Gb/s of bandwidth, along with Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 for the first time via Apple's N1 chip. The new Mac Studio also supports genlock over USB-C and can drive up to eight displays.

The M5 Ultra chip includes an up to 36-core CPU with 12 super cores and 24 performance cores, delivering up to 1.25x higher single-threaded performance and up to 1.3x higher multithreaded performance than the M3 Ultra. It features a GPU with up to 80 cores and a Neural Accelerator built into each core, offering up to 4.5x the peak GPU compute for AI tasks compared to the M3 Ultra and more than 6x compared to the M1 Ultra. The M5 Ultra is built by connecting two dual-die M5 Max chips using Apple's next-generation UltraFusion technology, which increases inter-die bandwidth to over 4.4TB/s.

The new Mac Studio with the M5 Ultra supports up to 512GB of unified memory and up to 1.2TB/s of memory bandwidth, a 50% increase over M3 Ultra. Users can cluster multiple Mac Studio systems together using built-in Thunderbolt 5 and RDMA support, with a cluster of four systems delivering up to 3x faster AI inference. The M5 Max variant offers an to 8TB of storage and delivers up to 3.9x faster AI performance than the previous generation. The new Mac Studio will be released on September 22, with the 512GB memory model launching in late October. It is available for pre-order now.