In early March, Apple announced the M1 Ultra chip, the next giant leap for Apple silicon and the Mac. Featuring UltraFusion — Apple’s innovative packaging architecture that interconnects the die of two M1 Max chips to create a system on a chip (SoC) with unprecedented levels of performance and capabilities — M1 Ultra delivers breathtaking computing power to the new Mac Studio while maintaining industry-leading performance per watt.
The new SoC consists of 114 billion transistors, the most ever in a personal computer chip. M1 Ultra can be configured with up to 128GB of high-bandwidth, low-latency unified memory that can be accessed by the 20-core CPU, 64-core GPU, and 32-core Neural Engine, providing astonishing performance for developers compiling code, artists working in huge 3D environments that were previously impossible to render, and video professionals who can transcode video to ProRes up to 5.6x faster than with a 28-core Mac Pro with Afterburner.
“This [UltraFusion] technology showed up at just the right time,” says Tim Millet, vice president of hardware technologies at Apple. “In a sense, it is about Moore’s law,” he adds, in reference to the decades-old axiom, named after the Intel cofounder Gordon Moore, that chip performance — measured by the number of transistors on a chip — doubles every 18 months.
It is no secret that Moore’s law, which has driven progress in the computer industry and the economy for decades, no longer holds true. Some extremely complex and costly engineering tricks promise to help shrink the size of components etched into silicon chips further, but engineers are reaching the physical limits of how small these components, which have features measured in billionths of a meter, can practically be. Even if Moore’s law is outdated, computer chips are more important—and ubiquitous—than ever.
“Depending on how you define Moore’s law, this approach allows you to create systems that engage many more transistors than what fits on one chip,” says Jesús del Alamo, a professor at MIT who researches new chip components…
The M1 Ultra demonstrates the kind of horsepower seen in some of the market’s most powerful chips thanks to a creative take on the chiplet approach. It also sets Apple up to achieve a significant edge for Macs—just as it has with the iPhone for years.
MacDailyNews Take: As usual, Apple’s outclassed also-rans struggle to compete.
See also:
• Qualcomm insider: Apple’s 64-bit A7 chip set off a panic, it ‘hit us in the gut’ – December 16, 2013
• Apple’s powerhouse M1 Ultra chip is bad news for Intel, AMD, and Nvidia – March 16, 2022
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Breathe new life into Apple’s stock price.
Let’s go… You know who!
Good one! 😂
Apple’s share price is up 225% in the past two years and is up over 500% over the last 5 years. Is a 37% annual rate of return over 5 years and a 56% annual rate of return over 2 years not acceptable to you? May I suggest lottery tickets?
Trumpublicans are such jerks…
Left wing Biden-fell8ters like PJS are such jerks, dangerous jerks because they’ll spread STDs by fell8ting all their bum-chums who think Biden is a hero. ByeBiden, take your soiled PJS with you.
It’s a terrible misunderstanding of Moore’s “Law”. The concept is the amount of transistors in the same space. We could make chips the size of the entire wafer of 300mm dia., but that wouldn’t be advancing chip density, which is what it’s all about. And the “law” says nothing about computing power, that’s inferred from having more, smaller transistors, but it’s not part of the calculation. Going from 5nm to 4nm, and then 3nm is working in Moore’s Law, but making bigger chips is not.
You don’t think Apple will start shrinking its processors? Sometimes you have to go big before you can go small. Apple knows what it is doing, Melgross, unlike PJS who is a mental returd.