The first Mac Studio tests have arrived and with them… the first benchmarks of the new M1 Ultra chip. We can thus compare Apple’s graphs to reality… and we don’t really explain some of the data displayed by Apple.
When the M1 Ultra was announced, which can be found on the Mac Studio, Apple had prepared a whole bunch of graphs and figures. We came back to this announcement to better understand how Apple designed its new ARM chip.
Stronger than an RTX 3090?
Surprisingly, the GPU seemed overpowered. According to Apple, the graphics performance of the M1 Ultra would be superior to that of the graphics card GeForce RTX 3090 from Nvidia, which is currently the graphics card fastest consumer on the market. And in addition, the M1 Ultra chip would only consume a little more than 100 Watts, which is 200 Watts less than the RTX 3090.
In terms of figures, the information is rather plausible: the GA102 GPU used by NVIDIA has 28.3 billion transistors, while the M1 Ultra has 114 billion. Apple designed a larger GPU, with more silicon, to maintain lower clock frequencies (and therefore optimize power consumption). Of course, Apple also has a huge manufacturing process advantage, using TSMC’s N5 etch process over Samsung’s 8nm process found on the Nvidia RTX 30s.
Since the lifting of the embargoes, including our test, The Verge has decided to pit the M1 Ultra against the Nvidia RTX 3090 using Geekbench 5 graphics benchmarks. Unsurprisingly, the A1 Ultra cannot be compared to Nvidia’s chip when that chip is running at full power. The Mac Studio beat the 16-core Mac Pro, but performance was about half that of an RTX 3090.
In short, we do not know how and why Apple had fun comparing the performance of its new chip with the RTX 3090 graphics card. The fact is that Apple did not have to do all that: the Apple M1 Ultra shines with impressive performance for its consumption.
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