Mac Studio with M5 Ultra can handle half a terabyte of memory. You'll pay for it like a car

The Mac mini wasn’t the only one Apple retired yesterday. At the same time, the Mac Studio also received a new generation, a rectangular box for people who make a living working with computers. The star is the variant with the M5 Ultra chip and up to eighty-core graphics, which Apple calls the most powerful it has ever built.

M5 Max: eighteen cores and faster graphics

The cheaper of the two relies on the M5 Max, which first appeared in the MacBook Pro this year. The processor has eighteen cores in a ratio of six super cores to twelve performance cores, and the graphics can be configured with up to forty cores, each with a neural accelerator. Apple speaks of up to a fifty percent increase in graphics performance compared to the previous generation, with memory bandwidth increasing from 546 to 614 GB/s.

More interesting, however, is what’s happening with memory. The base starts at 36 GB and goes up to 128 GB, which are exactly the same numbers as with the M4 Max at its launch. However, Apple had gradually cut back the offering due to a global memory shortage – just yesterday, the old generation stopped at 96 GB. So, the new series is essentially just bringing back what customers could have bought a year ago.

M5 Ultra and half a terabyte of memory

The top-tier M5 Ultra is created by combining two Max chips and will offer up to 36 CPU cores (twelve super and twenty-four performance). According to Apple, this represents roughly a thirty percent increase in multi-threaded tasks compared to the M3 Ultra – a solid, but not miraculous, improvement.

The real numbers are hidden elsewhere. The graphics have up to 80 cores and, for the first time in the history of Ultra chips, have received neural accelerators. Memory starts at 96 GB and can be pushed to 512 GB with 1.2 TB/s bandwidth. The media engine has doubled the number of blocks for both video encoding and decoding, allowing it to handle up to 33 simultaneous 8K ProRes streams. This is no longer a computer for enthusiasts, but a tool for an editing studio or for local execution of large language models.

Eight monitors and Thunderbolt 5

Among the rest of the features, worth mentioning is support for up to eight external monitors, or four Studio Display XDR units at 5K resolution at 120 Hz. Storage is roughly twice as fast thanks to the PCIe Gen 6 interface, and it includes Thunderbolt 5 with 120 Gb/s, Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 via the N1 chip, and genlock support for synchronization with professional cameras.

Orders can be placed starting today, with deliveries beginning on September 22. However, there is one exception: configurations with 512 GB of memory will arrive at the end of October.

Does it make sense for you to acquire a computer with half a terabyte of memory today, or is it purely a matter for studios?

Sources: 9to5Mac, AppleInsider, t3n