As we witness Apple's generational updates of the M series of chips, the highly anticipated SKU of the 3rd generation of Apple M series yet-to-be-announced top-of-the-line M3 Ultra chip is growing speculations from industry insiders. The latest round of reports suggests that the M3 Ultra might step away from its predecessor's design, potentially adopting a monolithic architecture without the UltraFusion interconnect technology. In the past, Apple has relied on a dual-chip design for its Ultra variants, using the UltraFusion interconnect to combine two M series Max chips. For example, the second generation M Ultra chip, M2 Ultra, boasts 134 billion transistors across two 510 mm² chips. However, die-shots of the M3 Max have sparked discussions about the absence of dedicated chip space for the UltraFusion interconnect.

While the absence of visible interconnect space on early die-shots is not conclusive evidence, as seen with the M1 Max not having visible UltraFusion interconnect and still being a part of M1 Ultra with UltraFusion, industry has led the speculation that the M3 Ultra may indeed feature a monolithic design. Considering that the M3 Max has 92 billion transistors and is estimated to have a die size between 600 and 700 mm², going Ultra with these chips may be pushing the manufacturing limit. Considering the maximum die size limit of 848 mm² for the TSMC N3B process used by Apple, there may not be sufficient space for a dual-chip M3 Ultra design. The potential shift to a monolithic design for the M3 Ultra raises questions about how Apple will scale the chip's performance without the UltraFusion interconnect. Competing solutions, such as NVIDIA's Blackwell GPU, use a high-bandwidth C2C interface to connect two 104 billion transistor chips, achieving a bandwidth of 10 TB/s. In comparison, the M2 Ultra's UltraFusion interconnect provided a bandwidth of 2.5 TB/s.

Apple today announced M2 Pro and M2 Max, two next-generation SoCs (systems on a chip) that take the breakthrough power-efficient performance of Apple silicon to new heights. M2 Pro scales up the architecture of M2 to deliver an up to 12-core CPU and up to 19-core GPU, together with up to 32 GB of fast unified memory. M2 Max builds on the capabilities of M2 Pro, including an up to 38-core GPU, double the unified memory bandwidth, and up to 96 GB of unified memory. Its industry-leading performance per watt makes it the world's most powerful and power-efficient chip for a pro laptop. Both chips also feature enhanced custom technologies, including a faster 16-core Neural Engine and Apple's powerful media engine. M2 Pro brings pro performance to Mac mini for the first time, while M2 Pro and M2 Max take the game-changing performance and capabilities of the 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro even further.

"Only Apple is building SoCs like M2 Pro and M2 Max. They deliver incredible pro performance along with industry-leading power efficiency," said Johny Srouji, Apple's senior vice president of Hardware Technologies. "With an even more powerful CPU and GPU, support for a larger unified memory system, and an advanced media engine, M2 Pro and M2 Max represent astonishing advancements in Apple silicon."

Apple's ongoing pursuit of leading performance in custom silicon packages continues with each new generation of Apple Silicon. Today, we have alleged Geekbench performance figures of the upcoming M2 Max chip, designed for the upcoming Mac devices. Featuring the same configuration with two E-cores and eight P-cores, the chip is rumored to utilize TSMC's 3 nm design. However, that is yet to be confirmed by Apple, so we don't have the exact information. In the GB5 single-thread test, the CPU set a single-core performance target of 1899 points, while the multi-core score was 8737. While last year's M1 Max chips can reach 1787 single-core and 12826 multi-core scores, these configurations are benchmarked in a Mac Studio, which has better cooling and allows for higher clocks to be achieved.

Apples to apples (pun intended) comparison with the M1 Max chip inside of a MacBook Pro version with presumably the same cooling capacity, which gets 1497 single-core and 11506 multi-core score, the new M2 Max chip is 19.4% faster in single-core results. Multi-core improvements should follow, and this M2 Max result should be different from the final product. We await more benchmarks to confirm this performance increase and the correct semiconductor manufacturing node.

Max Tech performed the first detailed teardown of the Apple Mac Studio, the most powerful Mac since Apple dumped Intel for processors in favor of its own silicon based around high-performance Arm chips built from the ground-up for its own software ecosystem. The M1 Ultra SoC powering the Mac Studio is its most striking piece of technology, with Apple attaching some very tall performance claims not just for its CPU compute performance, but also graphics rendering performance.

The M1 Ultra SoC is physically huge, with roughly similar package size to an AMD EPYC processor in the SP3 package. An integrated heatspreader (IHS) covers almost the entire topside of the package. Things get interesting under the hood. The M1 Ultra is a multi-chip module of two M1 Max dies connected on package using Apple UltraFusion, a coherent fabric interconnect that allows the various components of the two M1 Max dies to access memory controlled by the other die. Speaking of memory, The M1 Ultra features up to 128 GB of LPDDR5 memory that's on-package, This memory is used for the CPU, GPU, as well as the neural processor, and has a combined memory bandwidth of 800 GB/s. The M1 Ultra features up to 20 CPU cores, up to 32 Neural cores, and up to 64 GPU cores (8,192 programmable shaders).

Less than 24 hours after Apple's launch event, the first Geekbench numbers for the new Apple M1 Ultra CPU are out and the numbers are interesting to say the least. For starters, the system the Geekbench numbers are from, is the top of the range 20 Core SKU with 128 GB of RAM. This helps us get some additional insight into Apple's new CPUs. As Apple didn't provide much in technical terms yesterday, nor on its website, we now know that the clock speed of the M1 Ultra is the same 3.2 GHz as the regular M1. It also appears that the CPU cache remains the same, even though Geekbench is only listing the cache of the efficiency cores for some reason.

Although Geekbench isn't a reliable cross-platform benchmark, we do at least get an idea of how the new SoC from Apple performs. The single core performance is more or less on par with the Apple M1 Max, but loses out quite easily to Intel's Alder Lake processors. However, once we move to the multi-threaded test, the M1 Ultra really shows what it's capable of. Surprisingly the performance scaling is almost linear with the double of performance CPU cores compared to the M1 Max, which suggests that Apple's multi-chip module design is extremely capable. The interesting thing will be to see how well this design scales for GPU intensive applications. Stepping outside of the Apple ecosystem, the M1 Ultra ends up somewhere around an AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970X in terms of multi-core performance. Scaling over some of the detailed tests aren't somewhere between 80-90 percent depending on the particular test compared to the M1 Max, if we compare to the faster results on Geekbench, which is still quite impressive considering we're looking at two M1 Max CPUs that are technically glued together.

Apple yesterday announced its M1 Ultra processor. It is designed to be one of the most powerful solutions ever envisioned for desktop users, and it leverages some of the already existing technologies. Essentially, the M1 Ultra chip combines two monolithic dies containing M1 Max designs. They are stitched together to create one massive chip behaving in a rather exciting way. To pair the two M1 Max dies together, Apple has designed a package called UltraFusion, which is a die-to-die interposer with more than 10,000 signals. It provides 2.5 TB/s low latency inter-processor bandwidth and enables seamless sharing of information across two dies.

What is more interesting is that this approach, called multi-chip module (MCM) design philosophy, allows the software to view these two dies as a single, unified processor. Memory is shared across a vast pool of processor cache and system memory in a single package. This approach is software agnostic and allows hardware to function efficiently with loads of bandwidth. Apple notes that no additional developer optimization is required for the new processor, and the already-existing stack of applications for M1 Max works out-of-the-box. Talking about numbers, the M1 Ultra chip has a potential main memory bandwidth of 800 GB/s, with up to 128 GB of unified system memory. We are yet to see how this design behaves as the first Mac Studio units start shipping, so we have to wait for more tests to check these claims out.

When Apple launched its first M1 iMac, it was to mixed reviews, partially due to the new design, but also due to the fact that it only came with a 24-inch display option. Now rumours of a new 27-inch iMac have surfaced and it might launch as soon as on the 8th of March, when Apple is due to hold its first event of the year. However, if the rumours are true, a lot of Apple fans are going to be disappointed once more, as the 27-inch model is said to only come in a single Pro SKU. The 27-inch iMac is expected to potentially have multiple CPU options though, as it might be offered with the M1 Pro and M1 Max chips.

The Bloomberg story also talks about a "half-sized Mac Pro" based on either of the high-end M1 chips as well. In this case there isn't much in terms of details to go on, but the author expects it to land at WWDC in June, although shipments are expected in the autumn. Other speculation include the typical kind of transitions you'd expect, like current products moving to Apple's M2 silicon towards the end of the year. That said, a 13-inch MacBook Pro might be on the books, as a cheaper or lighter alternative to the current 14 and 16-inch models. The event in March is also expected to bring a new iPhone SE and iPad Air to market, with as yet unknown specs.

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Intel is expected to announce their Alder Lake mobile processors in Q1 2022 with rumors and leaks for several of these chips already surfacing. The i7-12700H has recently been spotted running Cinebench on what could possibly be an MSI GE76 Raider 12UH with the results showing impressive performance gains. The processor features six Golden Cove (P) cores and eight Gracemont (E) cores for a total of 14 cores and 20 threads.

The i7-12700H includes a configurable base TDP of 35 W - 45 W and this specific sample was running at a reported base frequency of 2.9 GHz during testing. The processor scored 689 points in Cinebench R20 single-core which places it 12% faster than the Core i9-11950H and 21% faster than AMD's flagship Ryzen 9 5900HX. The processor widens this gap in Cinebench R20 multi-core with a score of 7158 points placing it 47% above the 8-core, 16-thread Ryzen 9 5900HX. We can also see that multi-core performance is 49% faster than the recently released Apple M1 Max in Cinebench R23. AMD is preparing their Ryzen 6000 processors for an early 2022 launch which will be competing with these Alder Lake chips but we have yet to see many performance leaks for them to compare with.

This should be taken with a fair helping of salt, considering GFXBench 5.0 is mobile device focused benchmark, even though the company behind claims it's a platform independent benchmark. Regardless of that, it looks like the new 32 core GPU in Apple's M1 Max SoC offers some pretty competitive performance, as it manages GeForce RTX 3080 Laptop GPU in said test.

However, this is a median score for the GeForce RTX 3080 Laptop GPU and many of the tests that make up GFXBench 5.0 aren't using DirectX, which is one likely reason for Apple's M1 Max GPU beating the Nvidia card. On the other hand, all tests seem to support Metal, which is Apple's 3D API, whereas the Nvidia card has to fall back to using OpenGL which tends to offer lower performance than DirectX in games. In most of the tests we're looking at an average performance advantage of less than 10 percent in favour of Apple, but it's nonetheless impressive considering that Apple hasn't been in the GPU business for very long.

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Apple today announced M1 Pro and M1 Max, the next breakthrough chips for the Mac. Scaling up M1's transformational architecture, M1 Pro offers amazing performance with industry-leading power efficiency, while M1 Max takes these capabilities to new heights. The CPU in M1 Pro and M1 Max delivers up to 70 percent faster CPU performance than M1, so tasks like compiling projects in Xcode are faster than ever. The GPU in M1 Pro is up to 2x faster than M1, while M1 Max is up to an astonishing 4x faster than M1, allowing pro users to fly through the most demanding graphics workflows.

M1 Pro and M1 Max introduce a system-on-a-chip (SoC) architecture to pro systems for the first time. The chips feature fast unified memory, industry-leading performance per watt, and incredible power efficiency, along with increased memory bandwidth and capacity. M1 Pro offers up to 200 GB/s of memory bandwidth with support for up to 32 GB of unified memory. M1 Max delivers up to 400 GB/s of memory bandwidth—2x that of M1 Pro and nearly 6x that of M1—and support for up to 64 GB of unified memory. And while the latest PC laptops top out at 16 GB of graphics memory, having this huge amount of memory enables graphics-intensive workflows previously unimaginable on a notebook. The efficient architecture of M1 Pro and M1 Max means they deliver the same level of performance whether MacBook Pro is plugged in or using the battery. M1 Pro and M1 Max also feature enhanced media engines with dedicated ProRes accelerators specifically for pro video processing. M1 Pro and M1 Max are by far the most powerful chips Apple has ever built.