New Mac Studio: chip confusion and up to 17,624 euros expensive
Apple offers two SoC generations in one computer line at the same time – and the older one is faster? Yes, that's the case. At exorbitant prices.
M4 Max and M3 Ultra in the Mac Studio: smaller is bigger or what?
(Image: Apple)
Yesterday's launch of the new Mac Studio – the third generation of the compact workstation – caused quite a few raised eyebrows among users and market observers. A new Mac with two different Apple Silicon generations at the same time? And the old version is even potentially faster? All of this requires explanation, as do the possible configurations and prices.
M3 Ultra is faster than M4 Max
The first piece of information up front: Yes, an M3 Ultra is faster than an M4 Max. The simple reason for this is that the Ultra uses two M3 Max in interconnect mode, using Apple's UltraFusion interconnect. “Apple's proprietary UltraFusion packaging technology uses an integrated silicon interposer that connects two M3 Max chips over more than 10,000 signal lines, enabling interprocessor bandwidth of more than 2.5 TB/s with low latency,” writes the manufacturer. The M3 Ultra appears for software as a chip – This is already known from the Mac Studio M2 Ultra and M1 Ultra.
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The M4 Max, on the other hand, is only available as a single SoC, not as an Ultra-twin pack. The reason: Apple does not want to treat every M generation to Ultra chips and apparently does not even install the necessary UltraFusion connections in the M4 Max, as reported by a French Apple website. This is interesting in connection with the new Mac Pro, which is still missing: will it also “only” receive an M3 Ultra? Or will Apple wait until the M5? Apple states that the M3 Ultra works “almost twice as fast” as the M4 Max – even though it is an older chip generation. The advantages of the M4 over the M3, which amount to between 20 and 30 percent more performance depending on the operating mode, do not seem to count in Ultra mode. The direct comparison between the two chips seems to (almost) double everything: the M4 Max has 16 CPU cores, the M3 Ultra 32, the GPUs are 40 to 80, the Neural Engine 16 to 32. However, the memory configurations are significantly wider with the M3 Ultra: you can order up to 512 GB, with the M4 Max only up to 128 GB. The memory bandwidth has not quite been doubled: 546 GB/s to 819 GB/s.
Configurations up to small car level
A look at Apple's configuration options for the Mac Studio shows that this is a professional to luxury product. The M4 Max starts at 2499 euros, the M3 Ultra at 4999 euros. As standard, 36 and 96 GB RAM or 512 GB and 1 TB SSD are installed – unfortunately puny for the price. At least Thunderbolt 5 is available for all models.
The top configuration for the M4 Max is 7374 euros. It comes with 16 CPU cores, 128 GB of combined RAM (for GPU and CPU) and an 8 TByte SSD. With the M3 Ultra, you can spend a total of 17,624 euros. For this, you get 32 CPU cores, 512 GB of combined RAM and a 16 TByte SSD. Unfortunately, a Kensington lock is not included.
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