iPhone SE and iPad Air M1
Tim Cook kicked off his conference with the long-awaited and highly leaked iPhone SE which now embeds the A15 Bionic chip and offers a 5G modem to be up to date. As expected, the new SE retains the chassis of the iPhone 8 with the fingerprint reader, Touch ID, placed on the front and under the screen (but not behind). A new iPad Air is also in the game and features an M1 SoC, which makes it a real powerhouse – same chip as on the iPad Pro – and with 8 CPU cores, it is, according to Apple, 60 % faster than the previous generation model. The iPad Air also includes a 12 MP photo module that supports Center Stage.
M1 Ultra and Mac Studio
The surprise comes mainly from the presentation of a new chip which completes the M1 family. After the M1 (all right), the M1 Pro and the M1 Max, here is the M1 Ultra and its 114 billion transistors! No M2 therefore, but a merger between two SoC M1 Max. In total, the chip will be able to manage up to 128 GB of unified memory, will have 20 CPU cores (16 high-performance) and 64 GPU cores. At the level of the Neural Engine, 32 cores will be at work to execute no less than 22 billion operations per second. With two “welded” Max chips, the Ultra version offers a “Media” engine capable of accelerating the encoding and decoding of video streams.
To accommodate this new “double chip”, a new case is needed. And not just any box, since it’s a brand new Mac, called Mac Studio, which will be the first machine equipped with this monster of power. This steroid-inflated Mac mini will also have, among other things, four Thunderbold ports on the back and two USB-C ports on the front as well as an SD card reader.