Last fall, Apple already upgraded the necessary Mac computers. For example, the M3 chip was added to the iMac and MacBook Pro. The iPad Pro was recently even equipped with an M4 chip. The chance that Apple will provide the Mac Studio with an M4 Ultra processor this year is small.
In the Power On newsletter from Mark Gurman it can be read that Apple plans not to upgrade the Mac Studio and Mac Pro until 2025. Apple may add the M4 Ultra to these power machines in the first half of 2025.
3nm manufacturing process
At the end of 2023 they achieved another first, they released the first 3-nanometer chips on the PC market. Like the A17 Pro for iPhone 15 Pro (Max), the M3 chip is designed using a 3nm manufacturing process. This is an advanced manufacturing technology used to make semiconductor chips. A 3nm process means that the transistor gate is only 3 nanometers wide, we explain what is so special about it.
The M4 Ultra will also feature this advanced manufacturing technology, with the benefit of dramatically better performance, brand new GPU architecture, a faster CPU and Neural Engine, and support for more central memory.
M4 Ultra chip for Mac Studio
The Mac Studio may be the first Mac to include an M4 Ultra chip. Just like the previous versions, the Ultra will once again contain double the number of components of the Max version. We can probably expect the following specifications:
- 24-core CPU with 16 performance cores and 8 efficiency cores
- up to 80-core GPU
- 32-core Neural Engine
- Ray tracing with hardware acceleration
- Four video encoding engines
- 800 GB/s memory bandwidth
- choice of up to 192 GB of RAM
- choice of up to 8 TB of storage
Availability Mac Studio 2025
The Mac Studio with M4 Ultra chip is most likely expected in the first half of next year. In addition to the M4 Ultra processor, you can probably also purchase the Mac Studio with an M4 Max chip. The current price for this powerhouse is from €2429 with an M2-Max and €4849 for the M2 Ultra. Prices will probably remain more or less the same. The new processors will therefore be added to the Mac Pro, possibly not until the summer of 2025 after WWDC.