Apple has unveiled two new Apple Silicon chips today. The M6 chip debuts in a new Mac mini model and marks Apple’s first 2nm processor. The M5 Ultra launches in a refreshed Mac Studio and is Apple’s most powerful chip ever.
The M6 is Apple’s first 2-nanometer chip, which the company says increases transistor density and power efficiency. The M6 features a 12-core CPU, two more than the M5 chip. That includes two super cores, four performance cores, and 6 efficiency cores. M6 features a 12-core GPU, which is two more cores than M5. Apple says this enables a 30% increase in peak GPU compute for AI compared to M5. That’s up to 10% faster than M5.
This allows it to upgrade compute blocks without increasing die size. Notably, it’s Apple’s first processor with all three CPU core types. There’s a Neural Accelerator in each core. The M6 GPU also features updates to its shader core architecture, Dynamic Caching, and hardware-accelerated ray tracing. M6 supports up to 32GB of unified memory with up to 170GB/s of unified memory bandwidth.
Additionally, M6 can process FP8 natively in hardware, whereas M5 handles FP8 through software. FP8 is an 8-bit format designed to make AI workloads faster and more memory-efficient M5 Ultra supports up to 512GB of unified memory with up to 1.2TB/s of unified memory bandwidth, which is 50% higher than M3 Ultra.
