Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra chips in refreshed Mac mini and Mac Studio

Apple is launching two new chips in its M-series lineup that represent very different ends of the Apple silicon range. The M6 brings a modest but meaningful refresh to the entry-level desktop, while the M5 Ultra pushes into new territory at the high end and is aimed squarely at professionals running demanding local workloads.

Apple's M6 is its first chip built on a 2 nm process, likely TSMC N2. Apple has swapped two "super cores" for four performance cores, a two-core bump over the previous M5. The M6 has two super cores, four performance cores, and six efficiency cores, for a total of three CPU clusters. The CPU is paired with a 12-core GPU, two more cores than the M5 GPU, with Neural Accelerators in every core for MetalFX upscaling. Two 16-core Neural Engines, providing 32 cores in total, double the previous generation's count to handle on-device AI. Apple cites up to four times faster AI performance, twice the graphics and storage performance, and 40 percent faster CPU performance compared with the M4 Mac mini. Memory starts at 16 GB and is configurable up to 32 GB, with up to 170 GB/s of memory bandwidth, suggesting a move to 128-bit, 10,667 MT/s LPDDR5X memory.

The M5 Ultra links two M5 Max dies using next-generation UltraFusion, making it Apple's first quad-die design, with inter-die bandwidth of over 4.4 TB/s. It scales to a 36-core CPU (12 super cores and 24 performance cores) and an 80-core GPU with Neural Accelerators throughout, delivering up to 4.5 times the peak AI compute of the M3 Ultra. There is also a binned version with a 30-core CPU and a 64-core GPU. Unified memory tops out at 512 GB with 1.2 TB/s of bandwidth, suggesting a 1,024-bit bus with 9,600 MT/s LPDDR5X. That bandwidth is double that of the M5 Max and 50 percent higher than that of the M3 Ultra. The configuration is aimed at running large LLMs locally and handling memory-intensive professional workloads.

The new M6 Mac mini starts at $899 for the base configuration with 16 GB of memory and 256 GB of storage, while the new M5 Ultra Mac Studio starts at $5,499 for the base model with a 30-core CPU, a 64-core GPU, 96 GB of memory, and 1 TB of storage. Preorders for both open today, with shipping beginning September 22.