Apple's M4-equipped MacBook Pro, Mac mini, and 24" iMac lineups are set to debut next week. The M4 family of desktop-class SoCs, which will soon be joined by the M4 Pro and M4 Max, is likely to bring substantial performance improvements to the aforementioned Mac models. If the recently leaked benchmarks are anything to go by, the M4-powered lineup appears poised to outperform Intel's "Lunar Lake" rather comfortably, while bringing the heat to AMD's "Strix Halo" as well as Intel's upcoming "Arrow Lake-H"-powered notebooks.

For those interested in the thin-and-light segment, the MacBook Air has always presented itself as a very decent option. According to recent reports by Mark Gurman, the M4-equipped MacBook Air is scheduled for launch sometime during January to March of 2025, with mass production set to start soon. The Mac Studio, which was supposedly slated to launch alongside the MacBook Air, is now delayed by a few months and will possibly see the light of day during the second quarter of 2025.

According to Geekerwan, Apple's latest M4 silicon has achieved a remarkable milestone by using liquid nitrogen to chill Apple's M4 iPad Pro. This unconventional approach unlocked great single-core performance, surpassing even the M3 Max and M2 Ultra processors in Geekbench v6 benchmark tests. The setup involved cooling the M4 iPad Pro, equipped with a 3+6 core configuration, using a Kingpin Cooling T-Rex Rev 4 CPU LN2 pot filled with liquid nitrogen. This extreme cooling allowed the M4 processor to operate at an astonishing 4.41 GHz during the benchmark run, resulting in a staggering single-core score of 4,001 points. This score represents a 28% increase over the M3 Max found in the 16-inch MacBook Pro and an impressive 44% improvement over the M2 Ultra powering the Mac Studio.

Notably, the M4's single-core performance is capable of reaching scores in the 3,000s. With liquid nitrogen cooling, it suprases the 4,000-point mark, making this achievement all the more remarkable. While the M4's multi-core performance did not match the lofty expectations set by its single-core power, it still managed to achieve a score of 13,595 points, outperforming both the M3 Max and M2 Ultra, which scored 20,957 and 21,330 points, respectively. This was done on the 3+6 core configuration with three P-cores and six E-cores, which is not the top-end M4 configuration. This shows that with adequate cooling, like MacBooks, the upcoming M4 Pro and M4 Max chips could achieve much higher performance than their predecessors.

As we witness Apple's generational updates of the M series of chips, the highly anticipated SKU of the 3rd generation of Apple M series yet-to-be-announced top-of-the-line M3 Ultra chip is growing speculations from industry insiders. The latest round of reports suggests that the M3 Ultra might step away from its predecessor's design, potentially adopting a monolithic architecture without the UltraFusion interconnect technology. In the past, Apple has relied on a dual-chip design for its Ultra variants, using the UltraFusion interconnect to combine two M series Max chips. For example, the second generation M Ultra chip, M2 Ultra, boasts 134 billion transistors across two 510 mm² chips. However, die-shots of the M3 Max have sparked discussions about the absence of dedicated chip space for the UltraFusion interconnect.

While the absence of visible interconnect space on early die-shots is not conclusive evidence, as seen with the M1 Max not having visible UltraFusion interconnect and still being a part of M1 Ultra with UltraFusion, industry has led the speculation that the M3 Ultra may indeed feature a monolithic design. Considering that the M3 Max has 92 billion transistors and is estimated to have a die size between 600 and 700 mm², going Ultra with these chips may be pushing the manufacturing limit. Considering the maximum die size limit of 848 mm² for the TSMC N3B process used by Apple, there may not be sufficient space for a dual-chip M3 Ultra design. The potential shift to a monolithic design for the M3 Ultra raises questions about how Apple will scale the chip's performance without the UltraFusion interconnect. Competing solutions, such as NVIDIA's Blackwell GPU, use a high-bandwidth C2C interface to connect two 104 billion transistor chips, achieving a bandwidth of 10 TB/s. In comparison, the M2 Ultra's UltraFusion interconnect provided a bandwidth of 2.5 TB/s.

Apple today announced M2 Ultra, a new system on a chip (SoC) that delivers huge performance increases to the Mac and completes the M2 family. M2 Ultra is the largest and most capable chip Apple has ever created, and it makes the new Mac Studio and Mac Pro the most powerful Mac desktops ever made. M2 Ultra is built using a second-generation 5-nanometer process and uses Apple's groundbreaking UltraFusion technology to connect the die of two M2 Max chips, doubling the performance. M2 Ultra consists of 134 billion transistors—20 billion more than M1 Ultra. Its unified memory architecture supports up to a breakthrough 192 GB of memory capacity, which is 50 percent more than M1 Ultra, and features 800 GB/s of memory bandwidth—twice that of M2 Max. M2 Ultra features a more powerful CPU that's 20 percent faster than M1 Ultra, a larger GPU that's up to 30 percent faster, and a Neural Engine that's up to 40 percent faster. It also features a media engine with twice the capabilities of M2 Max for blazing ProRes acceleration. With all these advancements, M2 Ultra takes Mac performance to a whole new level yet again.

"M2 Ultra delivers astonishing performance and capabilities for our pro users' most demanding workflows, while maintaining Apple silicon's industry-leading power efficiency," said Johny Srouji, Apple's senior vice president of Hardware Technologies. "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."

Apple today at WWDC announced a slew of new products, but one major one that the industry has been waiting for is the Apple silicon update to the Mac Pro. The new Mac Pro features the similarly new M2 Ultra which combines two M2 Max SoCs together via their UltraFusion interconnect, similar to M1 Ultra. M2 Ultra remains on TSMC's 5 nm and features 24-cores as well as configuration options for up to a 76 FSTP GPU slice and 192 GB of unified RAM. Apple is making bold claims about M2 Ultra's performance in comparison to the outgoing Intel Mac Pro, claiming it to be 3x faster than the fastest Intel configuration. The new Mac Pro doesn't change the chassis or aesthetic of the 2019 Intel based Mac Pro, which means that it retains a much wider array of expansion options in both tower or rack mount configurations. Expansion options include eight Thunderbolt 4 ports, two USB 3.2 Type A, two HDMI, dual 10GbE ports, and a 3.5 mm audio jack on the rear. Inside the mostly empty chassis there are six open PCI-E Gen 4 x16 slots for expansion, however Apple will likely still not support third-party graphics options on Apple silicon machines so these slots are for predominantly for accelerator, capture, network, broadcast, and storage expansion boards. However, what appears to be a 12VHPWR sits alongside a pair of SATA expansion ports above the PCI-E on the motherboard. The 2023 M2 Mac Pro will start at $6999 USD and is available starting June 13th.