Ars Technica‘s Andrew Cunningham has published his review of the new M5 Ultra Mac Studio, arguing that the machine’s real audience is no longer just video editors and 3D artists. With the Mac Pro gone and local language models finally usable on Apple silicon, the Ultra Studio is aimed at people running open-weight models and agent software on their desk.
The base M5 Ultra starts at $5,499, $1,500 more than the equivalent M3 Ultra config at launch, and a 256GB/1TB machine that once cost $5,599 now lists at $9,499. Cunningham’s as-tested unit is $12,299. Performance is the fastest Apple Silicon he has ever measured — roughly 30% faster single-core and about 50% faster multi-core than the M3 Ultra.
Andrew Cunningham for Ars Technica:
The M5 Ultra is, by almost every measure, the fastest Apple Silicon processor built so far. The only place it loses is in single-core CPU performance, where the Mac mini’s humble M6 very narrowly beats it. But the gap is small — smaller than the gap between the M3 and M4 generations, for example — which helps keep it from feeling like as big a deal as it did when the last-generation Studio launched with the M4 Max and M3 Ultra.
In many of our general-purpose CPU and GPU tests, the Ultra’s CPU outruns the M5 Max by 80 or 90 percent, and the GPU is between 50 and 80 percent faster. That’s essentially in keeping with what we’ve observed in past Ultra chips — the CPU comes closer to 2x scaling than the GPU does. Compared to the outgoing M3 Ultra, M5 Ultra usually posts around 30 percent faster single-core CPU speeds, 50 percent faster multi-core CPU speeds, and GPU performance that’s anywhere from 33 to 66 percent faster, depending on the test. As you’d expect for a two-generation upgrade, it’s a big one…
The Ultra version of the Mac Studio remains a niche product for a small audience: People with thousands of dollars to spend and who want to work with AI models, who are OK with good-but-not-cutting-edge speeds, and who don’t want to pay OpenAI or Anthropic or whoever for all the tokens they might burn with playful experiments or by absorbing and editing a large codebase… But that audience does exist. Almost against my will, I find myself in it. It’s genuinely fun and freeing to be able to write hobby-project code at usable speeds without my data ever leaving my control.
MacDailyNews Note: More info about the M5 Ultra Mac Studio via Apple here.
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