Apple’s desktop lineup just got its two biggest AI silicon upgrades in years.
Tuesday brought the M6, the company’s first chip built on a 2-nanometer process. It debuts inside the Mac mini.
The M6 pairs a 12-core CPU with a 12-core GPU that puts a Neural Accelerator in every core. A dual 16-core Neural Engine doubles peak compute versus earlier chips. Unified memory tops out at 32GB, with multithreaded performance roughly 1.2x the M5.
The M5 Ultra arrives in the Mac Studio as Apple’s first quad-die processor. Two dual-die M5 Max chips link through the UltraFusion interconnect, which shuttles more than 4.4TB/s between dies.
Inside are up to 36 CPU cores and 80 GPU cores. Memory bandwidth reaches 1.2TB/s, and the memory ceiling sits at 512GB, enough to hold large language models in RAM and skip cloud round-trips for big runs. Apple claims 4.5x the peak AI compute of the M3 Ultra and more than 6x the M1 Ultra.
The Mac mini with M6 starts at $899 and the Mac Studio at $2,499 with M5 Max. M5 Ultra configurations start at $5,499. Pre-orders opened August 25, with shipping September 22 and the 512GB Studio following in late October.
