Noesion Radarnoesion.ai
Release2026-08-25

Apple launched two new Mac processors: the M6 in the Mac mini and the M5 Ultra in the Mac Studio. The M5 Ultra combines four chip dies and supports up to 512GB of shared memory, which Apple says allows very large AI models to run entirely on the machine rather than in the cloud. Apple's performance figures come from its own testing on preproduction hardware.

What changed

The previous top desktop chip, M3 Ultra, offered a two-die design with 800GB/s of memory bandwidth and no neural accelerators in its graphics cores.

What it unlocks

Running and fine-tuning AI models with hundreds of billions of parameters entirely on a desktop Mac, without sending data to a cloud service.

  • 512GB memory, 1.2TB/s bandwidth (M5 Ultra)
  • 32GB memory, 170GB/s (M6)
  • 4.5x GPU AI compute vs M3 Ultra
  • 2x Neural Engine compute (M6)

What you need to act on it

  • purchase of a new Mac mini (M6) or Mac Studio (M5 Ultra)
  • macOS 27 this fall for Apple Intelligence features

Sources

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