Ars Technica has gotten their hands on the newest Mac Studio and this time it’s packing an M2 Ultra chip. What does that mean? Imagine cramming the nearly the power of an Intel i9 – 13900K CPU and desktop class Nvidia RTX 4070Ti class GPU performance in an approximately 3.7L case that only uses 61 watts under CPU load. That’s a lot of power under the a tiny, tiny hood.
It does come at a price, though. For those that don’t know, Apple has eschewed Intel, AMD, and Nvidia chips in favor of creating their own ARM based processors. This transition has resulted in performance that rivals the highest-end PC components at a fraction of the power usage and heat generation. Of course this isn’t all due to ARM RISC based processors alone.
Apple is in the unique position to hand tune their OS to their chips and vice versa. They also are adding built-in sub-processors or integrated ASICs to boost performance in certain circumstance. The “media engine” portion of the chip “has dedicated, hardware-enabled H.264, HEVC, and ProRes encode and decode, allowing M2 Ultra to play back up to 22 streams of 8K ProRes 422 video” as an example.Apple has taken the design a step further from regular PC development by integrating the system and graphics memory onto the chip package itself. In the case of the M2 Ultra, you can have up to 192GB of combined memory that offers a 800GB/sec bandwidth. All of this combined to excellent performance and power usage surprising those who only know ARM chips as those used in phones and in the Nintendo Switch.
So about that price? I did mention this does come at a price above. It starts at $3,999 for the Ultra model. However, that’s not the one a professional would likely get. It’s pretty bare bones, and there is no way to upgrade it yourself. When you start bumping up the specs to larger amounts of memory (192GB), bump up to the 72 core GPU, and add a 2TB SSD, you’re looking at $6,999 machine. A very nice machine, but not a cheap one.
Check out the Ars Technica review from author Andrew Cunningham BY CLICKING HERE.
