Sunday, March 20th 2022
Apple Mac Studio Taken Apart, Reveals Giant M1 Ultra SoC
Max Tech performed the first detailed teardown of the Apple Mac Studio, the most powerful Mac since Apple dumped Intel for processors in favor of its own silicon based around high-performance Arm chips built from the ground-up for its own software ecosystem. The M1 Ultra SoC powering the Mac Studio is its most striking piece of technology, with Apple attaching some very tall performance claims not just for its CPU compute performance, but also graphics rendering performance.
The M1 Ultra SoC is physically huge, with roughly similar package size to an AMD EPYC processor in the SP3 package. An integrated heatspreader (IHS) covers almost the entire topside of the package. Things get interesting under the hood. The M1 Ultra is a multi-chip module of two M1 Max dies connected on package using Apple UltraFusion, a coherent fabric interconnect that allows the various components of the two M1 Max dies to access memory controlled by the other die. Speaking of memory, The M1 Ultra features up to 128 GB of LPDDR5 memory that's on-package, This memory is used for the CPU, GPU, as well as the neural processor, and has a combined memory bandwidth of 800 GB/s. The M1 Ultra features up to 20 CPU cores, up to 32 Neural cores, and up to 64 GPU cores (8,192 programmable shaders).
Source:
Wccftech
The M1 Ultra SoC is physically huge, with roughly similar package size to an AMD EPYC processor in the SP3 package. An integrated heatspreader (IHS) covers almost the entire topside of the package. Things get interesting under the hood. The M1 Ultra is a multi-chip module of two M1 Max dies connected on package using Apple UltraFusion, a coherent fabric interconnect that allows the various components of the two M1 Max dies to access memory controlled by the other die. Speaking of memory, The M1 Ultra features up to 128 GB of LPDDR5 memory that's on-package, This memory is used for the CPU, GPU, as well as the neural processor, and has a combined memory bandwidth of 800 GB/s. The M1 Ultra features up to 20 CPU cores, up to 32 Neural cores, and up to 64 GPU cores (8,192 programmable shaders).
41 Comments on Apple Mac Studio Taken Apart, Reveals Giant M1 Ultra SoC
AMD: moar cache
Intel: moar cores
Apple: moar die size
What a monster, huh. A Geekbench monster and not much else, that is :D
It's closer to more heatspreader area than die size since it's several dies closely connected via TSV. I don't have a problem with that approach it's the right thing do for the time being if anything to keep yields manageable. I think really until we've gotten to a point where it's no longer practical and feasible to enlarge the socket size dimensions on a MB it still make the most sense since 3D stacking becomes a more tricky en-devour once you increase heat into the equation more readily eventually more of that concern can certain decrease at smaller nodes though. You can really randomize those three names with that moar x satire all three are pushing for more everything. It's funny how it started as just a poking fun satire of AMD's bulldozer missteps really and has just transformed over the years into a byproduct of the complications of chip making and perpectuation of our desire for them to do more of everything despite 640KB being all you need.
It can run Baldur's Gate 3 at 4k/60fps for example.
Also you are just looking at the integrated heat spreader. All the ram is under there. The actual chip is a lot smaller. And even then the SOC can't be compared against a plain CPU or GPU, there's a lot of cache and other things that take space. 16GB DDR5 has more transistors than the M1 Ultra, and more than any CPU, for example. Ever added up the area of all the ICs you can see on a plain ram stick?
cores, maybe we have reached the pleateau of custom silicon and need to start integrating more cache for more performance. I’m curious about the latency, maybe we will see numbers.
All current general purpose tests show it’s slower overall than 1 or 2 generation old hardware X86-64, but for specific tests it’s still equal to current iteration hardware, 3D stack from AMD may be faster
Can get a TR based 3970x system with a top end graphics card for the same price...