Apple Introduces M6 & M5 Ultra Chips Ahead Of iPhone Event: All You Need To Know

Apple has unveiled two new chips - M6 and M5 Ultra - marking its biggest architectural leap in Apple silicon to date. M6, debuting in the new Mac mini, is Apple's first chip built on a 2-nanometer process. M5 Ultra, powering the new Mac Studio, is Apple's first quad-die SoC.

M6 chip key features and specifications

M6 targets everyday users, students, developers, and enterprises, balancing performance, efficiency and on-device AI. Its 2nm process packs in higher transistor density for a substantial jump in both speed and power efficiency.

It comes with a 12-core CPU (2 super cores, 4 performance cores, 6 efficiency cores) i.e. two more cores than M5, delivering what Apple calls the world's fastest single-threaded performance, up to 1.2x faster multithreaded performance than M5, and up to 2.4x faster than M1

Ther is also a 12-core GPU with a Neural Accelerator in every core, nearly 30 percent more peak AI compute than M5, and over 8x that of M1. It also has a dual 16-core Neural Engine, doubling peak on-device AI throughput over previous generations, with system frameworks able to tap both engines at once. It comes with an updated shader architecture, second-gen Dynamic Caching, and hardware-accelerated ray tracing, plus 50 percent higher geometry rates for complex scenes. The M6 chip comes with up to 32GB unified memory and up to 170GB/s of memory bandwidth, a 10 percent bump over M5 and 2.5x over M1

Apple says the gains translate into faster image editing, code compilation, file indexing, and agentic AI workloads, alongside smoother gaming and creative app performance.

M5 Ultra: Key features and specifications

M5 Ultra is aimed at professionals running the heaviest workloads like 3D rendering, visual effects, scientific computing, and large on-device AI models. It's built using next-generation UltraFusion technology to fuse two dual-die M5 Max chips into a single quad-die processor, a first for Apple silicon. The interconnect pushes inter-die bandwidth past 4.4TB/s with over 6x the connection density of prior generations, letting the four dies function as one processor.

The M5 Ultra comes with up to 36-core CPU (12 super cores, 24 performance cores), up to 1.25x faster single-threaded and 1.3x faster multithreaded performance than M3 Ultra. There is up to 80-core GPU with Neural Accelerators in every core, up to 4.5x the peak AI compute of M3 Ultra and over 6x that of M1 Ultra, plus third-gen ray tracing and hardware-accelerated mesh shading for up to 40 percent faster graphics than M3 Ultra. It has a 32-core Neural Engine for on-device AI and Apple Intelligence tasks. There is a Enhanced Media Engine with four ProRes encode/decode engines and hardware-accelerated AV1 decode It comes with up to 512GB unified memory with 1.2TB/s bandwidth, 50 percent higher than M3 Ultra.

M6 ships in the new Mac mini and M5 Ultra in the new Mac Studio, both available for pre-order now with retail availability from September 22.