Hardware Breakdown Presents: The Mac Studio
Apple has just announced its new flagship desktop, the Mac Studio. From a Design perspective, it looks similar to the Mac Mini, but that's stacked together. But eternally, the Mac Studio is packing some serious hardware, rivaling any PC workstation regarding performance. So is the Mac Studio an eventual replacement to the iMac? Probably not; it is an impressive machine nonetheless.
In the newly written episode of Hardware Breakdown, we at the Tekspecz studio examine the core hardware in the Mac Studio, which could be one of the most potent and fastest computers in the consumer market.
For this breakdown, we will profile the high-end model, which has the M1 Ultra, the newest processor from Apple. Only available for the Mac Studio.
It's all about the processor, the M1 Ultra.
The core engine in the Mac Studio is the M1 Ultra ( the base model has the M1 Max processor). The M1 processor is familiar to the tech community, garnering high praises for its optimal performance. However, as stated earlier in the post, the M1 Ultra is a newly released processor from Apple making its debut in the Mac Studio. The M1 Ultra has 20-cores with 16 performance cores and four efficiency cores. In addition, 48 core GPU, a 32-core Neural Engine 800GB/s memory bandwidth, As an option, you can get a 64-core GPU.
Interestingly enough, the M1 Ultra has over 114 billion transistors, as stated by Apple, the "most ever in a personal computer chip."
The unified memory and storage
The Mac Studio has a 64GB unified memory, configurable up to 128GB. In addition, the 8TB SSD is capable of delivering up to 7.4GB/s data transfer speed. So what does this all mean? Users can playback 18 streams of 8K ProRes 422 video.
The connection ports are the main selling point.
Arguably the core selling point on the Mac Studio is the wide variety of ports and connectivity options, the most ever in any Apple computer. Starting in the back, you have Four Thunderbolt ports, a 10Gb Ethernet Jack, Two USB-A ports, one HDMI port, and a Pro Audio headphone jack. In addition, there are two USB-C ports on the front of the Mac Studio with speeds capable of reaching 10Gb/s.
And let's not forget to mention there is a UHS-2 SD card slot supporting speeds up to 312MB/s.
