Apple’s new M6 chip gets more cores and more AI compute

Apple has announced a new M6 chip for Macs, along with an M5 Ultra that it says is its “most powerful chip ever,” designed for tasks like 3D rendering and running frontier AI models. The M6 is Apple’s first 2nm chip, which Apple says will bring improvements in performance and power efficiency, and it also has a Dual 16-core Neural Engine for on-device AI workloads.

The M6 has a 12-core CPU, up from 10 in the M5, and it includes two super cores, four performance cores, and six efficiency cores. (Apple’s “super” core terminology used to refer to performance cores, but it introduced a new type of performance core starting with the M5 Pro and M5 Max.) The company says the CPU offers “the world’s fastest single-threaded performance” and up to 1.2x faster multithreaded performance in comparison to the M5. The chip also has a 12-core GPU, up from 10 cores in the M5, and includes a Neural Accelerator with each core, Apple says. It supports as much as 32GB of unified memory.

Apple says that the M5 Ultra uses the company’s UltraFusion interconnect technology to connect two dual-die M5 Max chips together as one quad-die architecture. The M5 Ultra has an up to 36-core CPU with 12 super cores and 24 performance cores, an up to 80-core GPU, and a 32-core Neural Engine. It supports up to 512GB of “high-bandwidth” unified memory, which as usual with the M series isn’t upgradeable after purchase.

The M6 chip will be available in a new Mac Mini, while the M5 Ultra will launch in a new Mac Studio. Both computers will be available for preorder beginning Tuesday ahead of a release on September 22nd.