Apple Targets Local AI With New Mac Studio
The M5 Ultra combines up to 512GB of unified memory with faster AI performance and support for clustering multiple systems.
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Apple rolled out a Mac Studio powered by its M5 Max and M5 Ultra chips on Tuesday, August 25, targeting developers and researchers who want to run large artificial intelligence models locally.
The M5 Ultra version can be configured with a 36-core CPU, an 80-core GPU and 512GB of unified memory. Its memory bandwidth reaches 1.2TB per second, 50% more than the previous M3 Ultra model.
The company claims the M5 Ultra delivers up to 4.3 times the peak AI compute performance of the previous M3 Ultra, while the M5 Max offers up to 3.9 times faster AI performance than its predecessor. The figures are based on Apple’s own testing.
Apple is also allowing multiple Mac Studio systems to be linked through Thunderbolt 5 and remote direct memory access, creating a shared computing pool. A cluster of four systems can deliver up to three times the AI inference performance of a single machine, according to the company.
“With the powerful M5 Max and the incredible capabilities of M5 Ultra, Mac Studio ushers in a new era of desktop computing,” Apple hardware chief Johny Srouji said.
The M5 Max version comes with an 18-core CPU and up to a 40-core GPU, while both chips include neural accelerators inside their GPU cores to speed up AI workloads.
Apple is pairing the hardware with Core AI, a new framework for building and deploying models on Apple silicon, as well as its existing open-source MLX machine-learning framework. The company is positioning the combination for developers, researchers and companies that want to run or fine-tune models locally.
Connectivity has also been expanded, with Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6 and Thunderbolt 5 arriving on Mac Studio. The desktop supports up to eight displays and faster external storage.
The new Mac Studio is available for pre-order now and will begin shipping on September 22.
