New Mac studio: chip confusion and up to 17,624 euros expensive

Yesterday's introduction of the new Mac Studio – the third generation of the compact workstation – has ensured quite a few raised eyebrows for users and market observers. A new Mac with two different Apple silicone generation at the same time? And the old variant is even potentially faster? All of this ensures need for explanation, as well as the possible configurations including the prices.

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M3 Ultra is faster than M4 Max

The first information in advance: Yes, an M3 Ultra is faster than an M4 max. The simple reason: In the Ultra, two M3 Max are on the road in the connection, and Apple's Interconnect Ultrafusion is used. “The ultrafusion-packaging technology specially developed by Apple uses an integrated silicone interposer that combines two M3 Max chips via more than 10,000 signal lines and thus enables an interprilion range of more than 2.5 TB/s with low latency,” writes the manufacturer. The M3 Ultra appears for software as a chip – this is already known from Mac Studio M2 Ultra and M1 Ultra.

The M4 Max, on the other hand, is only available as a single SoC, not in the ultra double pack. The reason: Apple wants Do not treat Ultra-Chips to every M generationobviously does not install the necessary ultrafusion connections in the M4 Max, As a French Apple website reports. This is interesting, for example, in connection with the missing new Mac Pro: is it “only” received an M3 Ultra? Or is Apple waiting until the M5? Apple indicates that the M3 Ultra works “almost twice as quickly” as the M4 Max – despite the fact that it is an older chip generation. The advantages of the M4 compared to the M3, which are between 20 and 30 percent more power depending on the operating mode, do not seem to count in the ultra operation. The direct comparison between the two chips works when it (almost) doubles: the M4 Max has 16 CPU cores, the M3 Ultra 32, for the GPUS it is 40 to 80, at the neural engine 16 to 32. However, the memory configurations at the M3 Ultra are significantly wider: You can order up to 512 GB, with M4 Max only up to 128 GB. The memory bandwidth has not been completely doubled: 546 GB/s to 819 GB/s.

Configurations up to the small car level

A look at Apple Configuration options at Mac Studio shows that this is a professional to luxury product. The base on the M4 Max begins at 2499 euros, at the M3 Ultra at 4999 euros. By default, 36 and 96 GB of RAM or 512 GB and 1 TB SSD are installed – unfortunately puny for the price. After all, there are Thunderbolt 5 for all models.

The top configuration at the M4 Max is 7374 euros. There are 16 CPU cores, 128 GB of combined RAM (for GPU and CPU) and an 8 TB SSD. With the M3 Ultra you can spend a total of 17,624 euros. There are 32 CPU cores, 512 GB combined RAM and a 16 TB SSD. Unfortunately, a Kensington-Lock is not included.