Apple says not every Apple Silicon generation will get an Ultra

Apple released the M3 Ultra alongside M4 generation chips — but here's why we probably won't see the M4 Ultra.

On Wednesday, Apple announced its new Mac Studio. As anticipated, it launched with an M4 chip — the M4 Max, specifically.

But it also launched with the M3 Ultra. This left many people, including AppleInsider staff, wondering what Apple's reasoning was.

Ars Technica found out. When it asked Apple why the M3 Ultra made an appearance alongside M4 devices, the answer was simple.

According to Apple, not every chip generation will get an Ultra tier. While the first three generations have received an Ultra tier, with the M1 Ultra debuting in March 2022 and the M2 Ultra debuting in June 2023, it seems this may not be the case going forward.

The M3 Ultra is built with Apple's UltraFusion architecture, which links two M3 Max chips over 10,000 high-speed connections. These connections allow the two chips to function as a single unit.

Apple says it delivers 1.5 times the performance of the M2 Ultra and up to 2.6 times that of the M1 Ultra. The new GPU features dynamic caching, hardware-accelerated mesh shading, and ray tracing, making it well-suited for graphics-intensive tasks like 3D rendering and gaming.

And, as Numerama has learned, the M4 Max does not have UltraFusion connectors. The lack of connectors means that, as of now, an M4 Ultra is impossible without a re-engineering effort.

An Apple spokesperson has told Numerama that it opted to upgrade the Mac Studio now, rather than wait.

The backward compatibility of Thunderbolt 5 with the M3 architecture meant there was no reason to delay the upgrade. Otherwise, the company would have had to design an M4 Ultra from scratch or wait until the M5 Max.

So while Apple hasn't said explicitly that it won't release the M4 Ultra, it seems to strongly imply that we may not see another Ultra chip until the M5 generation — or even later.

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