Apple has a new powerhouse computer ready to go. The company today announced that it's refreshing the Mac Studio (which hasn't seen a change since 2023) with two new chips: M4 Max and M3 Ultra.
Don't get it twisted: while M4 Max is the same capable chip we released late last year in the MacBook Pro, the M3 Ultra is actually Apple's most capable processor to date, despite the generation names.
Meet M3 Ultra
M3 Ultra, like M2 Ultra, is comprised of two 3nm M3 Max chips with an interposer. M3 Ultra features up to a 32-core CPU with 24 performance cores — the most CPU cores ever in a Mac. There's an 80-core GPU, making for Apple's largest graphics chip yet, with support for Dynamic Caching, mesh shading, and hardware-accelerated ray tracing. The new chip also boasts a 32-core Neural Engine. M3 Ultra can pair with up to 16TB of internal storage, which is sure to be wildly expensive. Perhaps most importantly, it can use up to 512GB of unified memory with 800 GB/s memory bandwidth. This is enough to load large language models with over 600 billion in memory.
In a demo, I saw the M3 Ultra run Cinema 4D, where an artist wanted to spread foliage around a landscape. Using LM Studio, they created a Python script to scatter the assets, pasted it into Cinema 4D, and it was done. What could've taken a day took just minutes. From there, they were able to open Maxon Redshift to see a high-quality preview with hardware ray tracing.
In addition, I saw (but did not play) an early demo of Cyberpunk 2077, which is coming this year for Macs, running on the hardware, locked at 60 fps (thanks to VSync on the monitor) with full ray tracing.
Why no M4 Ultra? The M2 Ultra also lagged other chips, so it may just come down to development time. But Apple mentioned while showing some demos that not every generation of its silicon would get an Ultra chip, so time will tell if an M4 Ultra will show up at all. There have been M1 Ultra and M2 Ultra chips, so no Ultra chips have been skipped just yet.
Despite this top-end chip, there's no update (yet at least) to the Mac Pro, which is currently using M2 Ultra.
Like the existing Mac Studios, the Ultra-based computer will get more significant cooling, which means it will weigh approximately two pounds more than the Max version.
M4 Max and Connectivity
For those that don't need that massive chip, there's still the plenty powerful M4 Max option, with up to 16 CPU cores and up to 40 GPU cores. That starts at 36GB of memory and goes up to 128GB. The demo Isaw with that chip was a more straightforward video production project in Autodesk Flame, including base color and special effects layers.
Outside of performance, the other big benefit you get from the updated Mac Studio is a bump to Thunderbolt 5. On the M3 Ultra version, every single USB Type-C port carries that technology, while on M4 Max, the rear ports use Thunderbolt 5 while the front two ports use USB-C up to 10 Gb/s. On either model, you also still get a pair of USB Type-A ports for legacy peripherals, along with an HDMI port, 10Gb Ethernet, a headphone jack, and an HDMI port.
The Mac Studio with M4 Max will start at $1,999 with 36GB of RAM and 512GB of storage, while the M3 Ultra version will start at $3,999 with 96GB of RAM and 1TB of storage. Both are available for pre-order today and will launch on March 12.
