Apple Says Not Every Generation Will See an ‘Ultra’ Chip ⇥ arstechnica.com
Apple today announced the new Mac Studio, the most powerful Mac ever made, featuring M4 Max and the new M3 Ultra chip. The ultimate pro desktop delivers groundbreaking pro performance, extensive connectivity now with Thunderbolt 5, and new capabilities in its compact and quiet design that can live right on a desk. Mac Studio can tackle the most intense workloads with its powerful CPU, Apple’s advanced graphics architecture, higher unified memory capacity, ultrafast SSD storage, and a faster and more efficient Neural Engine. It provides a big boost in performance compared to the previous generation, and a massive leap for users coming from older Macs.
The introduction of the M3 Ultra, for which Apple issued an entirely separate press release, is a curious twist. Every other Mac available today updated in the past year uses the M4 generation, mostly because Apple makes essentially two computers: consumer Macs — the iMac, MacBook Air, and the Mac Mini — and its more “pro” Macs, with the M chip architecture generally shared across each these lines. You can quibble with my oversimplification — there is one M4 Pro configuration available for the Mac Mini, and the MacBook Pro now starts with the no-suffix M4 — but it is correct enough to make it conspicuous that the Mac Pro, the Studio’s architectural sibling, was not updated today.
Andrew Cunningham, Ars Technica:
When asked why the high-end Mac Studio was getting an M3 Ultra chip instead of an M4 Ultra, Apple told us that not every chip generation will get an “Ultra” tier. This is, as far as I can recall, the first time that Apple has said anything like this in public.
This statement doesn’t totally preclude the possibility of an eventual M4 Ultra — if Apple wanted to put more space in between the Mac Studio and the Mac Pro, reserving its best chip for the Mac Pro could be one way to do it. But it does suggest that Apple will skip the M4 Ultra entirely, opting to refresh these gigantic and niche chips on a slower cadence than the rest of its processors.
Seeing the Studio updated today instead of at WWDC gave me hope for a radical Mac Pro update in June. Apple’s statement to Cunningham makes me think that might not be coming.