Amber Neely
Apple released the M3 Ultra alongside M4 generation chips — but here's why we probably won't see the M4 Ultra.
On Wednesday, Apple announced its new Mac Studio. As anticipated, it launched with an M4 chip — the M4 Max, specifically.
But it also launched with the M3 Ultra. This left many people, including AppleInsider staff, wondering what Apple's reasoning was.
Ars Technica found out. When it asked Apple why the M3 Ultra made an appearance alongside M4 devices, the answer was simple.
According to Apple, not every chip generation will get an Ultra tier. While the first three generations have received an Ultra tier, with the M1 Ultra debuting in March 2022 and the M2 Ultra debuting in June 2023, it seems this may not be the case going forward.
The M3 Ultra is built with Apple's UltraFusion architecture, which links two M3 Max chips over 10,000 high-speed connections. These connections allow the two chips to function as a single unit.
Apple says it delivers 1.5 times the performance of the M2 Ultra and up to 2.6 times that of the M1 Ultra. The new GPU features dynamic caching, hardware-accelerated mesh shading, and ray tracing, making it well-suited for graphics-intensive tasks like 3D rendering and gaming.
And, as Numerama has learned, the M4 Max does not have UltraFusion connectors. The lack of connectors means that, as of now, an M4 Ultra is impossible without a re-engineering effort.
An Apple spokesperson has told Numerama that it opted to upgrade the Mac Studio now, rather than wait.
The backward compatibility of Thunderbolt 5 with the M3 architecture meant there was no reason to delay the upgrade. Otherwise, the company would have had to design an M4 Ultra from scratch or wait until the M5 Max.
So while Apple hasn't said explicitly that it won't release the M4 Ultra, it seems to strongly imply that we may not see another Ultra chip until the M5 generation — or even later.
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Oliver Haslam
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19 Comments
Many people in this forum used to say that Apple has made plans for next 5 years, or even 10 years. The question is - Was it part of Apple's roadmap to not have M4 Ultra for Mac Studio from the beginning OR it was part of the plan but Apple ran into unexpected issues and had to change their plans in the last minute?
Watching Miani's DoobToob response to today's release, he's wondering why Apple would do this, and also why Apple state that possibly future chips might not get an 'Ultra' upgrade.
Dood--MONEY! Money has always been Apple's motivation with his incremental upgrades. Imagine what an M4 Ultra's processing power could be, and then consider why any Ultra buyers would NEED to upgrade ever again? Or how many people would settle for an M4 Max Studio instead of going the laptop routes.
"Money Money Mooooney!"
When you see where the numbers are double in the Ultra what they in the M4 Max, I think for marketing purposes Apple choose "M3 Ultra" so they have "M4 Ultra" for the Mac Tower later. The number that will verify this thought will be the single core speed of the M3 Ultra vs the single core speed of the M4 Max.
In both the M1 family and the M2 family of four trim lines, the single core speed for each of the four trim lines were nearly identical. So we will have to see if the M3 Ultra has a single core speed like the M3 family or M4 family.
While it's nice that the M3 Ultra is now finally out, why did it take them over a year to release it? (The M3 line came out on October 30, 2023!) Why didn't they release the M4 Max Studio at the same time as the M4 Max MBP? If they had, I may have saved a few thousand $$$ since I got tired of waiting and bought the MBP. And is the single core performance of the M3 Ultra the same as the M4 Max? Enquiring minds want to know... But I guess with the 512MB memory capacity and the 80 graphics cores on top of the 32 CPU cores, the M3 Ultra should be killer LLM machine.