Steve Jobs’s philosophy and vision live on through Apple’s latest chip, the M1 Ultra. When the tech visionary unveiled the iPad a dozen years ago, he said: “What this device does is extraordinary. It is the best browsing experience you’ve ever had. ... It’s unbelievably great ... way better than a laptop. Way better than a smartphone.” In the crowd was former US vice-president Al Gore and other dignitaries. The quotable-quote from the unveiling came when he spoke about the Apple-designed processor, the A4. “It’s powered by our own silicon [and] it screams.”
Cut to the recent ‘Peak Performance’ showcasing from Apple a few days ago when the company revealed its M1 Ultra chip. In a matter of minutes the future of chip design changed. It won’t be the same again. Intel, AMD and Nvidia have to quickly update their game. Not that these companies don’t have the technology to catch up with Apple but they do have a significant drawback: Apple is not a silicon vendor. The company doesn’t need to work on a range of chips and then decide on the products these fit. Apple can build its silicon in a purposeful way. They know what their own products need and then go ahead with the process.
It’s fun time to be in chip manufacturing business. Not really, unless you are not Apple. The pressure will certainly be on for “chip vendors” to deliver fast and to a number of device manufacturers worldwide. Apple engineers work for Apple products only.
The backdrop
Take a step or two backwards to understand what has happened. After 15 years of friendship, Apple broke up with Intel in 2020. It wasn’t a decision out of the blue. Apple had been working for years on designing chips to replace the Intel microprocessors used in Mac computers. Nothing really changed since 2005 for Macs, which have used Intel chips that most PCs do. Apple has always efficiently designed chips used in iPhones and iPads. In 2008, Apple had purchased a 150-employee company called PA Semi and that was an important moment.
The current set-up has a large number of members who had worked at Intel, even Johny Srouji, who is now the company’s senior vice-president of hardware technologies, reporting to Tim Cook.
In 2020, Apple’s M1 arrived and reviewers were ecstatic. But Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger arrived on the scene in January-February 2021 with only thunder telling employees, according to The Oregonian, that his company had to “deliver better products to the PC ecosystem than any possible thing that a lifestyle company in Cupertino” makes. Big mistake.
In November 2021, Apple delivered its own custom-designed processors, the M1 Pro and M1 Max, which made every joke appear inane. The MacBook Pro with Apple’s M1 Max immediately became a creator’s delight.
Apple wasn’t done. A few days ago it showed the world M1 Ultra.
The excitement begins
Delivering extreme levels of performance pushes the envelope for Apple, so it scaled from M1 to M1 Pro to M1 Max. But the speedbreaker came in the form of how it can go beyond M1 Max. Be it M1 Pro or Max, these are highly integrated systems on chip combination of CPU, GPU, media engines, neural engines, memory interface, all on a single piece of silicon.
The M1 Max has been carrying this little secret at the bottom of the die — a chip-to-chip interface, a die-to-die interface that extends the fundamental fabric on the M1 Max across to another die itself. The packaging architecture is called UltraFusion, which literally fuses two chips together with another piece of silicon. There is a very small physical distance between the two die; it’s almost imperceptible.
Data can be shuttled around the chip at 2.5TB/s of low latency, inter-processor bandwidth, which is stupefyingly fast.
More importantly, it allows the fused elements to be presented as one unified set of resources to any software. To the software it appears as one 20 core CPU (16 high performance cores, 4 high-efficiency cores). It’s a 64-core GPU. Developers will treat it the same way they would treat the 32-core GPU on the M1 Max. The same goes for neural engine, media blocks and so on.
Each side of the chip can access memory on the other side of the package, minus software trickery. And it’s not just about performance; with it comes power efficiency. M1 Ultra reaches PC chip’s peak performance using 100 fewer watts, so less energy is consumed and fans run quietly.
Apple has managed to design a chip that’s 1.9 times as powerful as the latest 12th generation Intel Core i9-12900K CPU when both run at 60 watts. So, more CPU performance at a slice of the energy costs.
The first Geekbench scores show a Mac Studio running an M1 Ultra achieve a single-core score of 1,793 and a multi-core score of 24,055. Compared that with the highest end Xeon W Mac Pro scores of 1,152 and 19,951 in the same tests.
Enter the real world
Less power consumption is a good thing for individual users and a great thing for companies running banks of high-end machines, like professional video production studios. We can expect more and more people in the fashion design industry, video creators, and architects use the new Mac Studio, which supports M1 Ultra (it also supports M1 Max).
The company has already announced that it has one more Mac to introduce (at a later date), which could be the Mac Pro but it’s impossible to talk about Apple’s roadmap. Also, the foundation is ready for Apple to undertake M-series processors built on 3nm design processes perhaps in 2023-24, leading to power, performance, and efficiency enhancements.
Apple always had the Ultra in mind when it designed M1 Max, which shipped with the die-to-die interface at the bottom of the dock. The results are now here for all to see. You can order the Mac Studio right away but, of course, don’t use it to check how Chrome tabs can be opened. What we want to know why the Mac Stduio with M1 Ultra weighs two pounds more than the one with an M1 Max. We know the former has a larger copper thermal module vis a vis an aluminium heatsink. But is it only for better cooling? One thing we can certainly be sure of is “one more product” is in the works, according to John Ternus, Apple’s senior vice-president of hardware engineering. “But that is for another day.”
Mac Studio powered by M1 Ultra enables…
Each chip in the M1 family — M1, M1 Pro, M1 Max, and now M1 Ultra — unleashes amasing capabilities for the Mac
• Up to 3.8x faster CPU performance than the fastest 27-inch iMac with 10-core processor.
• Up to 90 per cent faster CPU performance than Mac Pro with 16-core Xeon processor.
• Up to 60 per cent faster CPU performance than 28-core Mac Pro.
• Up to 4.5x faster graphics performance than the 27-inch iMac, and up to 80 percent faster than the fastest Mac graphics card available today.
• Up to 12x faster than the 27-inch iMac, and up to 5.6x faster than 28-core Mac Pro when transcoding video.