From MacRumors · · 1m 20s
Apple's M5 Ultra glues four dies into one chip
Apple bolted two dual-die M5 Max chips together and called the result its most powerful silicon yet.
In brief
Apple bolted two dual-die M5 Max chips together and called the result its most powerful silicon yet. The M5 Ultra's real pitch is memory: 512GB of unified RAM lets you run hundred-billion-parameter models entirely on your desk. Originally reported by MacRumors.
Apple's biggest chip yet
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Apple announced the M5 Ultra on August 25, 2026, calling it the most powerful chip it has ever built.
“Apple today announced the M5 Ultra, which the company says is its most powerful chip ever.”
Four dies, one processor
Next-gen UltraFusion stitches two dual-die M5 Max chips together, Apple's first quad-die M-series design. Inter-die bandwidth tops 4.4TB/s with over 6x the connection density.
36 CPU cores
Twelve super cores and 24 performance cores push single-threaded speed up 1.25x and multithreaded up 1.3x against the M3 Ultra.
AI compute jumps 4.3x
The GPU scales to 80 cores, each with a built-in Neural Accelerator for the first time on an Ultra chip. Graphics run up to 1.8x faster than the previous generation.
33 streams of 8K
A 32-core Neural Engine pairs with a Media Engine carrying twice the video encode and decode blocks of the M5 Max, enough for 33 simultaneous 8K ProRes 422 streams at 30 fps.
512GB of unified memory
Memory bandwidth hits 1.2TB/s, a 50% jump over M3 Ultra. Apple says that headroom runs large language models with hundreds of billions of parameters fully on device.
“run large language models with hundreds of billions of parameters entirely on device”
The key point
The M5 Ultra's real pitch is memory: 512GB of unified RAM lets you run hundred-billion-parameter models entirely on your desk.
