The downside to the Mac Studio's various configurations, if there is one, is that Apple is still using the same CPU architecture as 2020's M1 Mac mini and smaller MacBooks, which also found its way into the 24" iMac. Unfortunately, you'll have to cough up $4,000 to find out what all that power can do for you. That's a bit more than the 760 GB found on the 10 GB version of the GeForce RTX 3080, for context. There's also four separate media engines (two per M1 Max), two 16-core neural processors, and a whopping 800 GB per second of bandwidth. 16 performance cores and a quartet of efficiency cores handle general purpose compute functions. Rather than a pair of 24 or 32-core GPUs, the operating system sees a single 48 or 64-core graphics processor.
The 2.5 TB per second bandwidth of the interconnect allows the M1 Ultra to present all of its resources to macOS as if it was a single monolithic chip. It boasts not only twice the CPU and GPU cores, but twice the memory capacity and bandwidth, too. The M1 Ultra really is two of everything. The M1 Ultra is so far exclusive to just the Mac Studio
Built from a pair of M1 Max chips tethered together by a high-speed interconnect, this processor represents Apple's current cutting-edge client computing platform. The base model is pretty similar to high-end MacBooks, but the M1 Ultra also made its debut. It comes in a couple of configurations, all more or less based on the M1 Max SoC.
#Things for mac reviews pro
Chipzilla proved it could get its hybrid architecture to scale down to much lower power envelopes, and that put a lot of pressure on Apple.īack in March, the company surprised the world with the announcement of the Mac Studio, a small but mighty desktop for pro content creators and those who, like me, daydream of being pros. In fact, that definitely came to pass, as laptops with 12th-gen Core processors generally offer outstanding performance. The desktop version had already blasted through our benchmark suite, notching a number of clear victories, and we had a pretty good idea that Intel could do the same thing in the mobile space. We closed out our MacBook Pro 14 review with a warning: Alder Lake mobile processors were coming soon. By and large, it delivered outstanding performance in both single-threaded and multi-threaded workloads, especially when considering overall system power draw. This is when Cupertino left Intel behind, and its x86 processors, to roll its own Mac-focused chips based on its legacy of high-performance mobile SoCs found in the company's iPhone and iPad line-ups.
#Things for mac reviews full
While it's only been about six months since Apple introduced the M1 Pro and M1 Max SoCs that would power the 16-inch and 14-inch MacBook Pro, the architecture within those chips can trace its roots back another full year to the dawn of Apple Silicon in the Mac mini's M1 processor.