Alongside the new Mac Mini, Apple also announced their latest Mac Studio, with Cupertino proudly calling it their most powerful Mac ever, and the ‘ultimate desktop’ for on-device AI and extreme pro workflows.
A big part of why Apple is so confident in the new Mac Studio is thanks to what’s under the hood. While the base model comes with the dual-die M5 Max, which is already powering their latest MacBook Pro models, the M5 Ultra takes it up a notch. You might have already heard of Apple’s Fusion Architecture, which is their way of ‘fusing’ two dies to form a single processor. Well, the M5 Ultra uses UltraFusion, connecting two dual-die M5 Max chips to form a quad-die architecture, a first for Apple Silicon.
UltraFusion allows the M5 Ultra to pack up to 36 CPU cores (12 ‘super’ cores, 24 performance cores) and up to 80 GPU cores, with an inter-die bandwidth of over 4.4TB/s. There’s also a 32-core neural engine, and support for up to 512GB of unified memory with a 1.2TB/s bandwidth.
Apple claims that the M5 Ultra will deliver up to 1.25x higher single threaded performance and up to 1.3x higher multithreaded performance compared to the M3 Ultra, Cupertino’s last ‘Ultra’ processor. The Mac Studio with M5 Ultra will also offer up to 15.4x faster CopyCat ML training performance in Foundry Nuke compared to the M1 Ultra, and 3.3x faster than the M3 Ultra. That’s on top of up to 9.8x faster LLM prompt processing in LM Studio and up to 4.3x faster text-to-image performance vs the M3 Ultra.
As for the Mac Studio with M5 Max, you’ll be able to choose between the base configuration processor with 18 CPU cores, a 16-core Neutral Engine and 32 GPU cores, or a souped up M5 Max with 40 GPU cores instead. The base M5 Max gets 36GB of memory and 512GB of storage as standard, with up to 8TB of storage optional. The M5 Max with 40 GPU cores meanwhile gets 48GB of memory stock, with up to 128GB of memory.
If you do choose to kit out your Mac Studio with the M5 Ultra though, you’ll first have to choose between the base processor packing 30 CPU cores and 64 GPU cores, or topping up RM5,850 for 36 CPU cores and 80 GPU cores. You’ll then get 96GB of memory and 1TB of storage, with options to upgrade to up to 256GB of memory and up to 16TB of storage. The option of 512GB of memory meanwhile will come later in the year according to Apple.
The rest of the hardware though is mostly the same for the Mac Studio, barring an upgrade in wireless connectivity to WiFI 7 and Bluetooth 6. You’ll still find two USB-C ports and an SD card slot on the front—USB 3 for the M5 Max and Thunderbolt 5 for the M5 Ultra—while on the back there’s a 10Gb Ethernet port, two USB-A 3 ports, a HDMI output, a 3.5mm audio jack, and four USB-C Thunderbolt 5 ports.
It’s also perhaps worth mentioning that the M5 Max Mac Studio supports up to five external displays (four at 6K with a fifth at 5K), while the M5 Ultra can do up to eight displays at 6K.
Mac Studio Malaysia pricing and availability
Just like the Mac Mini, the Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra will be open for pre-orders from 27 August onwards, with full availability and deliveries beginning on 22 September.
The Mac Studio with M5 Max starts at RM10,999, while the M5 Ultra configurations start at RM24,999. If you want to fully kit out your Mac Studio though, at time of writing that will set you back RM82,599—that’s even before the 512GB of memory option that’s only coming later this year.
For more information on the new Mac Studio, you can head over to the Apple Malaysia website.
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