Mac Studio M5 Max and M5 Ultra: Apple's Most Powerful Chip Ever Is Here!

25 Aug by Marcus Schmahl | |

2,1 / 5,0 | Reading time: 3 min

Mac Studio M5 Max and M5 Ultra: Apple's Most Powerful Chip Ever Is Here! · Source: Apple

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Alongside the new Mac mini, Apple today also unveiled new Mac Studio models with the M5 Max and M5 Ultra chip, the latter being the most powerful chip Apple has ever built. The M5 Ultra packs a CPU with up to 36 cores (12 super cores, 24 performance cores) and, according to Apple, delivers up to 1.25x higher single-threaded and up to 1.3x higher multithreaded performance compared to the previous generation’s M3 Ultra.

Mac Studio M5 Max and M5 Ultra: Everything on Specs, Pricing, and Release

Mac Studio M5 Ultra: A Neural Accelerator in Every GPU Core

The M5 Ultra’s GPU packs up to 80 cores, and every single core now includes a Neural Accelerator, delivering up to 4.5x higher GPU compute for AI tasks compared to the M3 Ultra, and more than 6x compared to the M1 Ultra. According to Apple, the latest shader core technology, combined with second-generation Dynamic Caching, hardware-accelerated mesh shading, and third-generation ray tracing, delivers up to 40% faster graphics performance than the M3 Ultra.

The Media Engine got a real upgrade too: dedicated hardware for H.264, HEVC, four separate ProRes encode and decode engines, and hardware-accelerated AV1 decode, plus a 32-core Neural Engine for on-device AI tasks.

Two M5 Max Chips as One Processor: How the Mac Studio M5 Ultra Comes Together

Technically, the M5 Ultra comes from fusing two dual-die M5 Max chips using Apple’s next-generation UltraFusion technology. This bumps inter-die bandwidth up to over 4.4TB/s and connection density by more than 6x, letting all four dies function effectively as a single processor.

The new Mac Studio with M5 Ultra supports up to 512GB of unified memory and up to 1.2TB/s of memory bandwidth, a 50% increase over the M3 Ultra. According to Apple, that added memory and bandwidth lets you store large datasets locally, boost tokens per second, and run large language models with hundreds of billions of parameters entirely on-device.

Mac Studio M5 Max: The Smaller Alternative

The Mac Studio also remains available with the M5 Max chip, offering an 18-core CPU, up to 40 GPU cores, up to 256GB of memory, and up to 8TB of storage. If you don’t quite need the Ultra model’s top-tier performance but still want noticeably more power than a Mac mini, this is the obvious pick.

The new Mac Studio launches September 22, though the 512GB unified memory model doesn’t arrive until late October. Pre-orders are open now, starting at $2,499 for the M5 Max and $5,499 for the M5 Ultra.

Verdict

With the M5 Ultra, Apple officially brings its most powerful chip ever to market, and the numbers behind it are genuinely impressive: 512GB of unified memory, up to 80 GPU cores, and the ability to run full language models with hundreds of billions of parameters locally.

For professional AI workloads, 3D rendering, or genuinely massive audio production setups running dozens of simultaneous instances, this is a serious upgrade, one that should hold up for years to come. At the same time, the Mac Studio with M5 Max remains a solid, more affordable alternative for anyone who doesn’t need to go all the way to the top of the Ultra lineup but still doesn’t want to compromise on power.