Apple today announced the Mac Studio, an entirely new Mac category, at its ‘Peek Performance’ event. The machine is aimed squarely at professionals looking for a level of performance even greater than what the new MacBook Pros can deliver.
The 3.7-inch tall Mac Studio is powered by the M1 Ultra chip that’s even faster than the M1 Max chip found in the 2021 MacBook Pros. It features a custom power supply and a thermal system featuring 4,000+ perforations on the back to guide hot air away from the internal components. This allows the Mac Studio to remain cool and barely make any noise even when under intense load.
For connectivity, the Studio packs four Thunderbolt 4 ports with USB-C, a 10-gigabit Ethernet port, HDMI 2.0, 2x USB-A ports, and a headphone jack. In the front, there are two USB-C ports and an SD card slot. On the wireless connectivity front, it supports Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.0.
M1 Ultra
The highlight of the Mac Studio is the M1 Ultra chip, which is basically two M1 Max die connected together using UltraFusion. The interconnect technology delivers a staggering 2.5TB/s of bandwidth, ensuring there’s no performance bottleneck. The Ultra features a 20-core CPU consisting of 16 high-performance CPU cores and four efficiency cores. This is paired with a 64-core GPU and a 32-core Neural engine. It also supports a staggering 128GB of RAM. Apple claims the M1 Ultra delivers better performance than the best desktop CPU while consuming 100W less power than it.
Performance Beast
The Mac Studio is the fastest Mac in Apple’s lineup, both in terms of CPU and GPU performance. Apple claims the machine is 50 percent faster than the 16-core Mac Pro and 2.5x faster than the 27-inch Intel iMac with a 10-core chip in CPU performance. The GPU performance is 3.4x faster than the 27-inch iMac and up to 3x faster than the most popular GPU option for the Mac Pro.
All this horsepower means the Mac Studio is the only computer in the world capable of playing back 18 streams of 8K ProRes 422 video. It also supports up to 4 Pro Display XDR at the same time.
The Mac Studio can be configured with up to 128GB RAM and up to 8TB SSD capable of reaching speeds of 7.4GB/sec.
Price and Availability
The Mac Studio starts from $1,999 for the M1 Max version, while the M1 Ultra variant will cost you $3,999. It is available for pre-order starting today and goes on sale from March 18.
