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Mac Studio The obvious physical point of comparison is the Mac mini, in more ways than one. First, if you ignore the Mac mini's overly protein-shake-heavy appearance, the Mac Studio bears a fair amount of resemblance to its stablemate.
The aluminum case has the same styling, with a rounded square footprint, a flat top with pronounced edges, and a black Apple logo on top. The Mac Studio is more than twice as tall as the Mac mini, at 3.7 inches to 1.4 inches, but both models are the same width and depth, at 7.7 inches.
Obviously, the addition of aluminum and other internal tweaks means more weight. The M1 Max version weighs 5.9 pounds, but the M1 Ultra version's copper heatsink weighs 7.9 pounds.
Top view of Mac StudioThis use of copper is a practical consideration. Generally speaking, copper is a better heat dissipation material than aluminum. Although aluminum is about 30% as dense as copper, it also has about 60% the electrical conductivity of copper, given the same basic structure of the heat sink.
However, aluminum is much cheaper than copper. For the same quality, copper costs about three times as much.
Like the Mac mini, there is a small power indicator dot in the front left corner, but rather than leaving the user completely blank, Apple has made some additions to the theme.
On the front of the Mac Studio, the M1 Max version has two USB-C ports, and the M1 Ultra version has two Thunderbolt 4 ports.
Front Mac Studio Port There's also an SDXC Class II card reader on the front, a component that was lost in the switch to Apple Silicon on the Mac mini. However, having it and two different flavors of USB-C ports placed in front of the user makes it easy to access them when needed.
Just like the Mac mini, the rest of the ports are at the back, but things have improved here too. There are four Thunderbolt 4 ports, along with two USB-A, a 10Gb Ethernet connection, HDMI, and headphone jacks.
The left power input on the Mac mini has been switched to a larger connection in the middle of the Mac Studio. The power button also got a move, moving from the rear right corner to the rear left corner.
Rear Mac Studio PortsDespite the larger size on the back, the ports are aligned with the bottom edge, beneath a very large perforated grille. Apple claims about 4,000 holes are used here, all of which help divert air for its new cooling system.
And, for whatever reason, the "new Mac smell" is different. Not as unpleasant, but it's different. Possibly the copper heatsink, possibly some manufacturing influence from the recycled materials in the case.
As it relates to the acoustics of the device, we measured an ambient noise baseline of 36 dBa using a Kanomax Model 4431 audiometer, with the test devices placed on a table at hand height, approximately three feet apart. The M1 Max Mac Studio reached 37 dBa at idle and 41 dBa under load.
The M1 Ultra Mac Studio reaches 39 dBa at idle and 42 dBa under load.
Strictly from a noise standpoint, in the same 36 dBa room and about the same distance, the 2018 Intel i9 MacBook Pro is about 40 dBa at idle and about 45 dBa under heavy load. The Intel-based 16-inch MacBook Pro can reach up to 44 dBa.
And, perhaps a more direct comparison would be the M1 Mac mini. The M1 Mac mini was indistinguishable from the environment at idle and 40 dBA under load. The Mac mini is much quieter, but that makes sense since it has half or a quarter the CPU area and heat of its taller cousin.
From a noise perspective, this puts the Mac Studio firmly between lower-end Apple Silicon hardware and Intel devices.
Air intake vents on the back of Mac StudioAll that said, the tone and personality of fans in Apple devices has been pretty much the same for the past decade—at least until now. The fans in the M1 Ultra Mac Studio are different and may require a short adjustment time if replacing a recently purchased desktop or laptop.
Like the different smell of a new Mac, the change isn't unpleasant—it's just different.
Mac Studio Review: M1 Ultra Project
The biggest feature of Mac Studio is its choice of system on a chip. Apple could have easily added the M1 Pro and M1 Max to a Mac mini case and called it a day.
The M1 Max does make it a version of the Mac Studio, but it's a new fourth M1 chip, the M1 Ultra.
Rather than designing an entirely new chip design from scratch or making significant changes to existing chips, Apple increased the core count by effectively gluing two chips onto a single piece of silicon.
Using the M1 Max as the basis for its 5nm process, Apple uses a chip-to-chip interconnect called UltraFusion to allow the two Max chips to communicate with each other on a low-latency bus. With more than 10,000 signal connections, the communication bandwidth between the two chips is up to 2.5 terabytes per second.
Unlike most multi-chip situations, this actually results in an almost complete doubling of benchmarks and performance from one chip. All told, this includes a total of 20 CPU cores, made up of 16 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores.
M1 Max and M1 Ultra versions of Mac Studio There are also dual-core Apple-designed GPUs, with base options of 48 cores and upgraded 64-core versions - all of which can be developed as a single GPU pair Personnel to address. That's not all, as the Neural Engine cores have been doubled to 32.
This multiplier effect also applies to other methods. For example, an M1 Max chip's unified memory amounts of 32GB or 64GB translate to 64GB and 128GB on the M1 Ultra. The 400GB/s memory bandwidth on the M1 Max also becomes 800GB/s on the M1 Ultra.
Double and how Apple is using UltraFusion technology to effectively double the PCI-E allocation lanes available to the machine. Aside from the higher RAM limit, that's actually why the front-end port in the configuration we tested today is Thunderbolt 4, while the M1 Max version's front-end is USB 3.2 type C.
For creative professionals, the Media Engine in the M1 Max pays off in handling video encoding and decoding, but it goes double. There are two video decoding engines, four video encoding engines and four ProRes encoding and decoding engines on the chip.
Mac Studio Review: Benchmarks and Speed
This review focuses on the top end of the Mac Studio, but it's useful to discuss it in parallel with the M1 Max version.
To sum up, benchmarks are helpful to a certain extent. They're never going to do the exact same calculations that you're doing, and the key for any given user in terms of interpreting these things is figuring out which line is best for any given use case.
That’s why when we get new Apple hardware in the studio, we always run a bunch of benchmarks on it, testing everything from Geekbench to 8K video export.
Starting with our browser testing, we run the Speedometer benchmark from BrowserBench to test a machine's ability to run web applications. The M1 Max runs at 293 beats per minute, while the M1 Ultra runs at 292 beats per minute. When considering the margin of error, it's actually the same.
Geekbench 5 results on Mac StudioIn Geekbench 5, our M1 Max Mac Studio delivered 1,798 single-core and 12,822 multi-core results. As expected, the M1 Ultra variant achieved a similar single-core score of 1,786, but an impressive multi-core score of 23,778 points, which all comes down to the 20 cores in the M1 Ultra.
Cinebench revealed similar numbers. The M1 Max version scored 1,535 and 12,389 points in the single-core and multi-core R23 tests respectively, while the M1 Ultra scored 1,535 and 24,210 points in the single-core and multi-core tests respectively.
Affinity Photo now has its own benchmark that tests vector performance and raster performance on the CPU, taxing both the CPU and GPU. We mainly looked at the combined CPU and GPU scores. The M1 Max has a CPU score of 947 and a GPU score of 22,537. The M1 Ultra has a CPU of 1,879 and a GPU of 33,668.
Geekbench’s Computational Graphics test echoes these results. When running on Metal, the Geekbench 5 Compute test scored 60,629 on the 24-core M1 Max GPU and 91,938 on the 48-core M1 Ultra GPU. The M1 Ultra graphics card is about 50% more powerful.
Ungine Heaven is starting to look a little dated, and it still runs under Rosetta rather than natively on Apple silicon, but that still helps gauge Rosetta's impact. When this game-specific benchmark was run, the M1 Max averaged 94 frames per second, scored 2,371, and maxed out at 186.4. The M1 Ultra averaged 102 FPS, scored 2,584, and topped out at 187 FPS.
These max out at about the same frame rate, but the M1 Ultra scores slightly higher and maintains a slightly higher frame rate throughout.
Blackmagic Disk Speed Results When testing the built-in storage, our 512GB SSD on the M1 Max achieved write speeds of 4629.7MB/s and read speeds of 5180.3MB/s in the BlackMagic disk speed test. That's down from the 1TB module in our M1 Ultra machine, which got 5163.2 MB/s write speeds and 5226.8 MB/s read speeds. The 2TB version has write speeds of 6403 MB/sec and read speeds of 6709.8 MB/sec.
SSD speed comes down to the impact of parallelization. Simply put, the more flash media chips a machine has, the faster read and write operations can be performed.
In Final Cut Pro, we exported multiple videos and saw varying degrees of performance differences. Unless you're doing very high-end productions, you probably won't see a huge difference in video performance even with the additional encoding and decoding engines on the M1 Ultra. So, let's make some.
When exporting a one-hour 4K video as "Apple Compatible," both machines finished in nearly the same time, 18 minutes. When we exported a 16-minute-long uncompressed 4K video in Apple ProRes, the M1 Ultra took 1 minute 14 seconds and the M1 Max 1 minute 30 seconds.
Ending the video test, we encoded Apple ProRes uncompressed 8K video, which took 5 minutes and 5 seconds on the M1 Max and 4 minutes and 42 seconds on the M1 Ultra.
But what you don’t get, as Apple promises, is the speed of the Nvidia 3090. Apple's chart related to Nvidia 3090 cards is misleading. For whatever reason, it looks like Apple is truncating the maximum performance of the Nvidia card, rather than the more likely expansion of the figure.
That said, all the headlines promoting this fact are also a bit disingenuous. Tomb Raider is still Rosetta, so there is a performance penalty compared to native code which is conveniently omitted from those tests.
There’s a lot of blame here. Apple's vague and incomplete charts help no one. Other testers, on the other hand, did not disclose the conditions under which they tested, or whether they were tested with Rosetta and the deprecated graphics were similarly unstable.
But we get it. Titles and subtitles like "Apple Lies" are flashy and draw attention. Welcome to the attention economy.
Also, the market price for the 3090 is ridiculous and doesn't even include the cost of the electricity required to run it. You can get the entire M1 Max Mac Studio for today's price of 3090, or you can already buy half of the M1 Ultra version.
So the bottom line of this conversation is that Apple's M1 Ultra is not a head-to-head performer compared to a full-throttle 3090 under maximum load. However, this is also almost entirely a gaming card and I find it unlikely that anyone would buy a Mac Studio for gaming.
Mac Studio Review: Those Mac Pro Comparisons
There are a lot of comparisons to the $28,000 Mac Pro configuration. We get it - it's a flashy comparison and illustrates what Apple can do now that it's free from Intel's shackles.
No one should trade in a $28,000 Mac Pro for a Mac Studio, not even the M1 Ultra. The $28,000 Mac Pro is a little faster than the high-end Mac Studio in most situations. Plus, it has those PCI-E slots, and a higher RAM limit.
The real question in 2022 isn’t whether you should replace your $28,000 investment with a Mac Studio—because there’s absolutely no need to. Instead, whether you should trade in a $6,000 Mac Pro for a $5,000 Mac Studio and upgrade with the purchase to make your life better is a question high-powered creatives should consider.
Geekbench 5 single-core results are for Mac Studio with M1 Ultra and Mac Pro with 8-core Intel Xeon. Across multiple CPU benchmarks, you'll find the same story when you compare the M1 Ultra to the 8-core Intel Xeon in the base model Mac Pro. This story is one of massive domination.
Geekbench 5 multi-core results are for Mac Studio with M1 Ultra and Mac Pro with 8-core Intel Xeon. Geekbench 5 illustrates this well, with its single-core test giving the M1 Ultra a score of 1,786 compared to the Mac Pro's 1,016. The same goes for multi-core, with the M1 Ultra's 23,778 almost triple the Mac Pro's 8,019.
Geekbench 5 calculations for Mac Studio with M1 Ultra and Mac Pro with 8-core Intel Xeon. In compute tests, the M1 Ultra produced more than double the output of the Mac Pro, at 91,938 to 41,772. This difference is shocking considering that Xeon chips seem "impressive" to the average user, even if there are several years of difference between the CPUs.
Cinebench R23 single-core results for Mac Studio with M1 Ultra and Mac Pro with 8-core Intel Xeon. Cinebench R23 story is almost the same. Single-core results favored the M1 Ultra, with the Mac Pro scoring 1,535 points for a score of 970, slightly closer to the Geekbench score.
Cinebench R23 multi-core results for Mac Studio with M1 Ultra and Mac Pro with 8-core Intel Xeon. On the multi-core front, the M1 Ultra's score of 24,210 is again more than double the Mac Pro's 9,294. For Affinity Photo's combined CPU test, the M1 Ultra's 1,879 was more than three times the Mac Pro's which managed 619.
Affinity Photo combines CPU results from Mac Studio with M1 Ultra and Mac Pro with 8-core Intel Xeon. The difference in results can be easily explained. On a single-core basis, the M1 Ultra has better cores than the Xeon used in the base Mac Pro.
The differences in multi-core results are further magnified because there are more cores at work in Mac Studio. A 20-core chip with better single-core performance will inevitably outperform another processor running only 8 cores.
Regardless of whether any particular benchmark we ran applies directly to your use case, Apple's Mac Studio is a blazingly fast computer. After any given user's point of difference, the speed increase becomes irrelevant.
The decision to buy a computer depends not only on budget, but also on how often you wait for a computer, not the other way around. During the day, if you're sitting around waiting for work to be done, maybe it's time to take a step or two into computing work other than what's on or under your desk now.
On the other hand, it won't get your email faster or browse the web faster. We've said it before, but a new, blazingly fast computer won't make you a better writer, photo editor, or videographer.
Still, some people can and will absorb all the speed, small size, and power efficiency.
As we usually have, we had the incredible privilege of testing the Mac Studio with some active duty personnel, as well as a few others who intended to use the machine for defense-related, time-sensitive number crunching. Without getting into the details of its primary purpose, they will take the now highly optimized Apple Silicon software, install it on new hardware, and effectively cut the processing time of large workloads in half.
In discussions during our testing, some of their Mac Pro fleet purchased for processing purposes will be reallocated to other locations. The machine's low power, heat and size are exciting, and there are already engineered mounts and shock absorbers for so-called "commercial off-the-shelf" - COTS - situations.
In a use case this writer is familiar with from years past, which at this point feels like a past life, we're told that the Mac Studio that does the job isn't as good as what's in that space now. A full kilowatt of electricity will be lost. Power and cooling requirements for small enclosed spaces. And it would be done in less than a tenth of the volume and 5% of the weight of what’s in the space now.
Stacked M1 Max and M1 Ultra Mac Studio We've talked to techies and techies in the music industry who are looking forward to replacing bulky hardware with Mac Studio and rack-mounted PCI-E cases .
Just in the last few days, we've seen a large local business offer some Mac Studio models to people with shared office spaces, with smaller monitors and keyboards on their desks than in 2020.
All this shows that Apple’s Mac Pro has always had a place. The cylindrical 6,1 Mac Pro has some interesting accessories because of its small footprint. We look forward to a lot of the same stuff being designed like crazy right now, and we look forward to what comes out on the other side.
If anyone in manufacturing is listening, someone needs to make a silicone Mac Studio stand. It’s time for Cube 2.0.
Where is the modularity?
Apple really likes to talk about the word "modularity."
Apple called the system modular during its launch event, and we're not sure what that means. There's no real modularity here unless you stack a few on top of each other and use Universal Control to do different jobs.
In our testing, we did find that the eGPU enclosure can be reused with Apple Silicon-supported PCI-E cards. Vendors like Sonnet have Thunderbolt PCI-e enclosures and systems that are better suited for cards not as big as graphics cards.
They are obviously an additional cost, but they work. This may be what Apple means when it says "modular," but we think it's an interesting Cupertino definition.
There has been some discussion in the last few days about how the SSD module plugs into the slot and is "inaccessible to the user". for some reason. This has translated into another "Apple Lies" catchy YouTube headline, suggesting that Mac Studio is upgradable.
So, we chose not to report it at the time because the claims made no sense. Instead, we asked Apple about it.
The reality is that these slots are only for Apple's own repairability and supplier configurability, sources within Apple's corporate structure who are not authorized to speak on behalf of the company tell us. This allows Apple to reduce the number of motherboard versions required for manufacturing and streamline the repair supply chain.
Another source within Apple tells us there are "no plans" to make the upgrade module available to customers. We're told that Apple-certified technicians supported by the store will use a serialization tool on the driver module.
Any given M.2 or SATA SSD has flash media and an onboard controller. In this case, Apple's module appears to be bare flash utilizing the controller within Mac Studio itself.
7,1 The Mac Pro has a user-upgradeable SSD module sold by Apple, which requires the upgrader to use Apple's Configurator tool. Two years later there is still no third-party option. Other machines, like the 2016 MacBook Pro with Touch Bar, had a storage slot for which Apple never offered an upgrade.
The RAM is still fully soldered, as is the CPU. Aside from the remotest possibility of a third party providing storage, this machine is virtually non-upgradeable, and there's no opportunity for upgrades other than storage.
Don’t assume that Mac Studio can actually be upgraded based on some irresponsible and inaccurate videos posted on Friday. Slots don't necessarily mean upgradeability.
Instead, buy the configuration you think you will need in a few years. You won't regret it in the long run, but your wallet will be hurt in the short term - unless you're using other people's money.
The voice of large-scale computing now and in the coming years
The first computer I had as a kid was an Apple II, which was at the absolute cutting edge of personal computing technology at the time. Over the years, I've owned my own Mac SE, a variety of machines that a Navy sailor could afford for a decade, a G4 plus G5 tower, the original quad-core Mac Pro, and now a 16-inch M1 Max MacBook Pro that I've been maintaining A sine wave centered on the average computing power line, which is a fuzzy Moore's Law-shaped exponential curve.
Over time, however, the distance between the similarly shaped peak computing power lines and my actual computing needs has been greater than they have historically been. I love computing power, I just don't need a bunch of it.
I am not a videographer. I no longer deal with sorting, processing, and storing megabytes, gigabytes, or terabytes (depending on the decade) of data. My days of computationally intensive image processing and subject recognition from a handful of pixels are essentially over.
Apple's 2022 Mac StudioAnd even the most recent fluid dynamics calculations I had to do were a black box to me. Rather than doing it locally. I enter data into the system and the computer on the other side of the internet outputs the data I need.
But, periodically, outside of thissite, I'll see that huge database, a confusing fluid flow problem, some weird stoichiometry math , or these images come up again and I'm asked to help. I personally don't need a computer that can process them in real time, but I'm glad the people I work with have that option when running macOS at the same time. And, I'm pretty sure the multimedia team at this site now appreciates their work.
As with 2021’s 14-inch MacBook Pro and 16-inch MacBook Pro updates, Apple engineering, led by Apple Silicon and led by Intel and AMD, continues to light the fire to improve without losing ground. In fierce competition, they all do better and work harder - and so does Apple.
The industry is being buoyed by the likes of 12th generation Intel chips, AMD's latest Threadripper, and Apple Silicon. This benefits both consumers and businesses, as iterations are faster and technology migrates from high-end to the computer-as-home-appliance crowd.
Mac Studio is a glimpse into the future. Its power eventually filters down to the low-end gears. But that day isn’t today, and if you have a Mac Studio, you can preview the power of tomorrow.
Bring a Mac Pro, Apple. You are ready.
Pros:
- Incredible speed
- G4 cube or Mac mini desktop footprint
- Front ports
- Quieter than alternatives under load, but...
Cons:
- ...when idle Not silent
- RAM and SSD are ridiculously expensive
- Apple has an interesting definition of modular
As a reminder, this is not a computer for everyone. If you're on the fence because you spend more time waiting on your computer than it does on you, get Mac Studio or buckle down the long wait with an Apple Silicon Mac Pro.
