Apple has opened orders for the most heavily equipped Mac Studio it has ever offered. As of October 28, the online store lets buyers pair the M5 Ultra chip with 512GB of unified memory, according to MacRumors, which says the option arrived on the late-October schedule Apple had promised.
What it costs
The 512GB option is only available on the higher M5 Ultra configuration, which has a 36-core CPU and an 80-core GPU and starts at $6,799 in the U.S. The memory upgrade itself adds $15,500, bringing the lowest possible price for a 512GB machine to $22,299.
Pushing the order to the top of the configurator makes it pricier still. Adding 16TB of storage, a $7,500 upgrade over the base 1TB, takes the total to $29,799, MacDailyNews reports.
The hardware
According to MacDailyNews, the M5 Ultra pairs a 36-core CPU, made up of 12 super cores and 24 performance cores, with an 80-core GPU that has Neural Accelerators in every core and a 32-core Neural Engine. The report describes the chip as a quad-die design built from two M5 Max dies, and says the 512GB of memory is shared by the CPU, GPU and Neural Engine at 1.2TB/s of bandwidth. The 16TB SSD uses a newer design that Apple says is up to twice as fast as the previous generation.
The entry Mac Studio costs $5,499 and comes with a 30-core CPU, 64-core GPU, 96GB of memory and 1TB of storage. Moving to the 36-core CPU and 80-core GPU chip adds $1,300.
Who it is for
The M5 Max version of the Mac Studio is still capped at 128GB of memory, so the 512GB option is a reason to choose the Ultra chip. MacRumors calls the memory step an expensive upgrade. Orders for the 512GB configuration opened this week, and deliveries are expected from late November to early December, according to MacDailyNews.
Apple has not said which workloads the memory option is aimed at, and the figures above come from Apple's online store as described by those two outlets.
0 comments