WWDC 2023: Apple launches M2 Ultra chip

Apple launched the M2 Ultra chipset on the opening day of the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) 2023 taking place in Cupertino, California. The new system-on-chip (SoC) is the last of the M2 family of chips and will power the new Mac Pro and Mac Studio. With this, Apple completes its transition from Intel’s chips to its custom silicon.

As per Apple, M2 Ultra is its ‘largest and most capable chip’. Its CPU GPU, and neural engine are 20%, 30%, and 40% faster than the predecessor M1 Ultra chip. “With huge performance gains in the CPU, GPU, and Neural Engine, combined with massive memory bandwidth in a single SoC, M2 Ultra is the world’s most powerful chip ever created for a personal computer,” said Johny Srouji, Apple’s senior vice president of Hardware Technologies.

The M2 Ultra chipset is built using a proprietary technology called UltraFusion, which uses a silicon interposer to connect two M2 Max dies, making it appear as a single chip to software. M2 Ultra has 800GB/s (twice of M2 Max) of system memory bandwidth and can support 192GB of unified memory (50% more than M1 Ultra). These features are especially useful for artificial intelligence applications, for example, to support massive machine learning workloads in a single system.

Notably, at the Computex 2023 event held last week, Intel demonstrated a working prototype of the Meteor Lake Processor integrated with a versatile processing unit (VPU). VPU is a central processing unit-integrated inference accelerated, tailored for computer vision and deep learning applications. Microsoft has partnered with Intel to utilise Meteor Lake processor’s ‘unique disaggregated architecture’ to enable AI-powered features for personal computer users.