Apple has announced fresh versions of the Mac Mini and Mac Studio desktop computers, alongside some new chips: the M6 and M5 Ultra.
Neither Mac desktop has undergone any physical changes on the exterior, but the long-awaited update brings these Macs back into stock after being difficult to buy for most of this year. Importantly, this serves as our first introduction to the M6 chip, which we will likely see much more of in future MacBooks.
Skipping the M5 entirely, the Mac Mini now comes in two flavors: the M6 and the M5 Pro. The M5 Pro is the same chip that’s currently found in the MacBook Pro, but the M6 is brand new. It’s the first Apple Silicon part to be built on 2-nanometer process technology and also adds extra cores to the mix. This is a 12-core CPU—another first for Apple—broken down into two super cores, four performances cores, and six efficiency cores.
New here are the performance cores, which Apple says are designed to speed up multithreaded tasks while preserving efficiency. Apple claims the M6 is 20 percent faster than the M5 in multithreaded performance and 40 percent faster than the M4.
Courtesy of Apple
The M6 comes with a faster GPU too, adding two more cores to the mix for a total of 12 GPU cores. This is also the first Mac Mini to have Neural Accelerators for faster on-device AI performance, a feature that launched in the M5 chip last year. The result is a Mac Mini that Apple claims is twice as fast as the M4 Mac Mini, along with providing higher throughput for gaming. Lastly, the M6 Mac mini also comes with what Apple calls a “dual 16-core Neural Engine,” which doubles the peak AI performance.
In addition to the extra performance, however, it also comes with a $200 price increase. The M6 Mac Mini now starts at $899 for the model with 16 GB of unified memory. The Mac Mini can still be configured with up to 32 GB of unified memory, and Apple says the tiny desktop is 40 percent faster, with bandwidth now up to 170 GB per second.
The M5 Ultra Arrives
The Mac Studio is also receiving a significant update. Like the Mac Mini, it still comes in two flavors: the M5 Max and the new M5 Ultra. This is the fourth generation of the Mac Studio to come out, with the M3 Ultra (and M3 Max) model coming out in early 2025.
Apple proudly claims that the M5 Ultra is Apple’s most powerful chip ever, and the first to use a “quad-die” architecture. Apple’s “Ultra” chips have always connected two Max dies together using using a technology called UltraFusion across a high-speed interconnect. The difference this time is that the M5 Max already had two dies itself, which is where the four dies come from. To keep those four chips running as fast as possible, the next version of UltraFusion increases the inter-die bandwidth to over 4.4 TB per second, allowing the whole array to function as a single CPU.
M5 Ultra Mac Studio comes with four more CPU cores for a total of 36. There are still 80 GPU cores (the same as on the M3 Ultra), but the M5-specific improvements to the GPU apply here for better overall performance.
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