Apple Inc. on Tuesday introduced two new chips for its Mac mini and Mac Studio systems, highlighting its latest advancements in silicon design and AI acceleration.
The Cupertino-based company unveiled the M6, a 12-core CPU chip built on a 2-nanometer process for the Mac mini, featuring a 12-core GPU with Neural Accelerators and a dual 16-core Neural Engine. The chip supports up to 32GB of unified memory with 170GB/s bandwidth, according to Apple.
For the Mac Studio, Apple launched the M5 Ultra, which combines two dual-die M5 Max chips via UltraFusion technology to create a quad-die architecture. The M5 Ultra offers up to 36 CPU cores—including 12 super cores and 24 performance cores—and up to 80 GPU cores. Memory capacity reaches 512GB with 1.2TB/s bandwidth, a 50% increase over the M3 Ultra. Apple also included hardware support for H.264, HEVC, four ProRes encode and decode engines, and hardware-accelerated AV1 decode.
Apple’s vice president of Silicon Engineering Group, Sri Santhanam, stated, “Today, we're debuting the next giant leap in performance and AI compute for Apple silicon with the incredibly advanced M6 and the most powerful M-series chip yet, M5 Ultra.”
The company claims the M6 delivers up to 1.2 times faster multithreaded performance than the M5 and up to 2.4 times faster than the M1. The M5 Ultra is positioned as offering up to 1.25 times higher single-threaded performance and up to 1.3 times higher multithreaded performance compared with the M3 Ultra, based on Apple’s internal testing conducted in August 2026. The announcements were made on August 25, 2026.
