Apple Unveils M6 and M5 Ultra Chips for Mac, Featuring 2nm Process and Quad-Die Architecture

Apple has announced the M6 and M5 Ultra chips, debuting in new Mac mini and Mac Studio models. The M6 is Apple's first 2-nanometer chip, featuring a new 12-core CPU (two super cores, four performance cores, six efficiency cores), a Dual 16-core Neural Engine, and up to 32GB of unified memory with 170GB/s bandwidth. It promises up to 1.2x faster multi-threaded performance than M5 and 2.4x faster than M1. The M5 Ultra, Apple's most powerful chip, uses a quad-die architecture fusing two dual-die M5 Max chips via UltraFusion, with interdie bandwidth over 4.4 TB/s. It offers up to a 36-core CPU, 80-core GPU with Neural Accelerators, up to 512GB of unified memory, and 1.2TB/s bandwidth. Peak GPU compute for AI is 4.5x better than M3 Ultra, and overall graphics performance is up to 40% faster. The M5 Ultra also includes a more powerful Media Engine with hardware-enabled H.264, HEVC, four ProRes codecs, and AV1 decode. Sri Santhanam, Apple's VP of Silicon Engineering, highlighted the chips' performance and AI compute capabilities. The announcement was made on August 25, 2026, via PetaPixel.