Apple has updated its Mac Studio, bringing in M2 chip architecture to the professional compact desktop.
Announced at WWDC 2023, the new Mac Studio will have the M2 Pro and M2 Max chips, which offer up to 50% faster performance than the previous Mac Studio. And for iMac users on the fence about an upgrade, the new Studio can deliver 4x faster performance than the most powerful Intel-based iMac.
While the M2 Max has a 12-core CPU and a GPU with up to 38 cores (in addition to access to up to 96GB of unified memory with 400GB/s of memory bandwidth), the real power will come from the new M2 Ultra chip that the next-gen Mac Studio can be equipped with.
Mac Studio with M2 Ultra chip
Made up of two M2 Max chips stitched together, the M2 Ultra has a 24-core CPU, a GPU with up to 76 cores, a frankly absurd 192GB of unified memory, and 134 billion transistors. All those numbers translate to a chip that offers 20% faster CPU performance and 30% faster graphics processing.
In actual use, this translates to 3D artists using Octane to render up to 3x faster, and enables colorists using DaVinci Resolve to see up to 50% faster video processing than before.
In short, professionals running demanding workloads like rendering multiple videos (there's support for up to 6x XDR Pro displays and 22 streams of 8K ProRes video) or working in After Effects and other pro creator tools, will find that the Mac Studio simply chews through them. That was arguably the case with the previous Studio, which was far from short of power, but for people looking to move from an older Mac or Intel machine to the latest Apple Silicon-based Mac, then the new Studio could be well worth considering.
And it should also be on the radar of people who work with machine learning workloads and tools, as the M2 Ultra can deliver 31.6 trillion operations per second.
Available to order today, the new Mac Studio starts at $1,999 / £2,099 / AU$$3,299, and is available to order today.
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