Apple has officially unveiled its strongest chipset yet, the M3 Ultra. Keep reading to discover everything you need to know about the powerhouse Apple processor.
The Apple M3 Ultra is the highest-performing chip Apple has released since the company announced its plan to transition all Macs to Apple Silicon processors in 2020.
The chipset packs Apple’s most powerful CPU, GPU and Neural Engine, along with the most unified memory ever in a PC. It also supports Thunderbolt 5 with twice the bandwidth per port compared to other Apple Silicon chips for faster connectivity and is designed using Apple’s UltraFusion packaging architecture which links to M3 Max dies together over 10,000 high-speed connections.
“M3 Ultra is the pinnacle of our scalable system-on-a-chip architecture, aimed specifically at users who run the most heavily threaded and bandwidth-intensive applications”, said Apple’s senior VP of Hardware Technologies Johny Srouji in the brand’s press release.
“Thanks to its 32-core CPU, massive GPU, support for the most unified memory ever in a personal computer, Thunderbolt 5 connectivity, and industry-leading power efficiency, there’s no other chip like M3 Ultra”.
Scroll down to learn more about this powerful chipset.
Apple M3 release date
If you’re hoping to get your hands on the M3 Ultra as soon as possible, you can pick up the new Mac Studio from March 12 2025 with pre-orders open now.
Apple M3 Ultra price
As of us publishing this guide, the only PC confirmed to be powered by the M3 Ultra is Apple’s newest Mac Studio computer, which is available with either the M4 Max or the M3 Ultra.
The most powerful Mac yet will set you back a whopping $3999/£4199 with the M3 Ultra chipset – that’s $2000/£2000 more than the M4 Max model, meaning this is by no means a budget computer.
Apple’s Mac Studio line is typically aimed at creative professionals who need a huge amount of power from their PC, meaning the Mac Studio with M3 Ultra might be overkill depending on what you’re buying it for.
Apple M3 specs and performance
According to Apple, the M3 Ultra combines a 32-core CPU with 24 performance cores and 8 efficiency cores for 1.5 times the performance of the Apple M2 Ultra with the largest GPU in any Apple chip. This includes up to 80 graphics cores, doubling the performance of the M2 Ultra says Apple.
The chip also features Apple’s advanced graphics architecture, enabling support for dynamic caching, hardware-accelerated mesh shading and ray tracing for faster performance when faced with content creation and games.
The 32-core Neutral Engine powers Apple Intelligence and the generative models in the new Mac Studio. This, combined with more than 800GB/s of memory bandwidth, apparently enables AI professionals to run LLMs with more than 600 billion parameters directly on their Mac.
Apple claims that the M3 Ultra’s unified memory architecture integrates the most high-bandwidth, low-latency memory found in a PC, with options starting at 96GB and going up to 512GB.
There’s also Thunderbolt 5 support, enabling data transfer speeds of up to 120 Gb/s or twice that of Thunderbolt 4. Each port also has its own custom-designed controller on the M3 Ultra chip. You can even use Thunderbolt 5 to connect multiple Mac Studio systems for more intensive workflows.
Other key specs included on the M3 Ultra chip are the display engine which supports up to eight Pro Display XDRS and the media engine, which supports hardware-enabled H.264, HEVC, and four ProRes encode and decode engines. This means that the M3 Ultra can play back up to 22 streams of 8K ProRes 422 video.
Finally, the Secure Enclave uses hardware-verified boot and runtime anti-exploitation technologies in its security solutions.
