I have a new Mac Studio. It looks almost identical to last year’s Mac Studio. In fact, it’s so similar that I had to put a post-it on it to distinguish between his two units in the office.
It’s a surprisingly compact, very Apple-like pro-level workstation. It’s also virtually non-upgradeable, so you have to be very careful about what you choose to buy. It basically has the same port as the last port. On the front there are two USB-C ports (Thunderbolt 4 on Ultra) and an SDXC reader, as well as four Thunderbolt 4, two USB-A, one HDMI and 10GB Ethernet. , 3.5mm audio jack, and the big Mickey Mouse power cable thing in the back.
There are also some other tweaks. Last year’s Studio was Bluetooth 5.0, this year’s Studio supports Bluetooth 5.3. The M1 Ultra can accommodate up to four 6K displays and one 4K display, while the M2 Ultra can have eight 4K, six 6K, or three 8K thanks to its upgraded HDMI port. . However, the biggest difference is the processor inside.
Last year’s Studio was configurable with an M1 Max or M1 Ultra, but it’s basically two M1 Max’s stapled together. This year’s Studio has been upgraded to the M2 Max and M2 Ultra, which are two M2 Max staples. You can tell they’re different because the number in the name is incremented by one. I’ve been testing his M2 Ultra unit in 2023 Mac Studio with 24 core CPU, 76 core GPU, 128 GB memory and 4 TB storage. and a test I did.
M2 Ultra units start at $3,999, and our particular system costs (wait a minute) $6,799, so this is already a machine accessible only to a fairly specific group of customers. (If you decide you need to upgrade, Apple will offer the now-discontinued M1 Ultra Studio as a trade-in credit “up to $1,500. Thank you, Apple!) That’s not exorbitant compared to the Mac Pro.” (or Threadripper PC, for example), but it’s still objectively a lot of money.
Nonetheless, this is my first look at Apple’s new M2 Ultra chip, and the chassis is poised to reach its full potential. So we ran a number of benchmarks to see how well it performed. Spoiler: The M2 Ultra is faster than its predecessor, but I honestly don’t know how important that is.
First off, what exactly has changed? Both the M1 Ultra and M2 Ultra are 5nm chips. There were rumors that the chip would have a smaller architecture, but that didn’t pan out for this generation.
Still, Apple made some design changes. The M2 Ultra has 20 billion more transistors than the M1 Ultra, allowing for higher specs and supporting 192 GB of unified memory, up from 128 GB on the M1. The M2 Ultra can also be configured with 24-core and 76-core GPUs, while the M1 was limited to 20-core and 64-core GPUs. I received the highest spec M2 Ultra chip available, so this review is more relevant. We’re basically looking at how much extra performance the extra cores really provide, all else being equal.
The biggest improvement is graphics performance. Those extra cores are doing the work. Geekbench’s GPU benchmark difference with both Metal and Open CL was 20-50% greater across trials than the M1 Ultra.This isn’t a system you’d want to buy primarily for gaming (e.g. it doesn’t match what you’d expect from an RTX 4090), but the frame rates are Shadow of the Tomb Raider It was also 10-30% higher across resolutions when running the game at its highest settings. The M2 Ultra also broke the 60fps barrier with his 4K resolution. This is fun and great.
M2 Ultra also showed an 18 percent increase over M1 Ultra in the Xcode benchmark that measures compile time. The time saved this way will certainly be a plus for busy developers.
In fact, PugetBench in Premiere Pro was the only result where the M2 Ultra scored poorly. I’ve run this test many times on both units and can’t figure out what’s wrong. I tweaked every setting I could think of, but to no avail. The scores I’m getting seem to match other M2 Ultra scores I see in Puget’s database. So it’s possible that something strange is going on. In any case, the M2 machine beat the M1 in the actual export in Premiere Pro, so my tendency is to suspect that the PugetBench and M2 Ultra are doing poorly for some reason (new It’s not unheard of in chips).
The M2 Ultra had a small but no improvement in CPU performance, both in single-core and (obviously due to the higher core count) multi-core performance. It’s worth noting that while both machines’ Cinebench scores dropped between his 10- and 30-minute loops, the delta between scores remained fairly constant. This means that the studio’s cooling system has less trouble keeping the M2 Ultra cool than it did with the M1 Ultra.
The studio’s cooling system has no problem keeping the M2 Ultra cool
In terms of cooling, I didn’t notice any significant difference in fan noise or heat between these two units. The M1 Ultra Studio has always been surprisingly quiet for me, even listening to the case, and I didn’t hear anything substantial from the M2 Ultra version either. I know you can find complaints on the internet about the noise of the M1 generation Studios, but is it by ear or the environment?
Regardless. The benchmarks (and quiet performance) are all good, but what ultimately matters is how well the device performs in day-to-day work.Alex Parkin The VergeThe art director of the video usually uses the M1 Ultra Mac Studio as his daily work machine, so he’s more qualified to talk about this than I am. After I popped it on his desk in the office, he kindly used his M2 Ultra machine for his morning work, completing tasks with After Effects, Photoshop, and Premiere Pro.
When I asked Alex if the M2 Ultra felt faster than the M1 Ultra, he shrugged a little. “Yeah,” he finally said after some thought.
He was able to complete a Premiere export in 10 minutes, which he estimated would take 20 minutes on a normal machine (which wasn’t too far off from my own export testing). Nevertheless, he did not consider the increase particularly life-changing. His assessment of his M2 Ultra Studio this year is a few degrees milder than the awe-inspiring response I got from creators who tried the M1 Ultra Studio last year (who were accustomed to Intel Macs and Windows PCs). It was He is completely satisfied with the computer he has. It’s not that surprising. The giant leap from Intel to Apple’s M1 platform is unlikely to be replicated here.
Speaking with Alex and other professionals who use Apple desktop hardware, it seems that the M1 Ultra So That speed is no longer a workflow hang-up. Alex’s biggest bottleneck at his current job tends to be glitches in Premiere and other software he has to use. This is a story often heard from people who design his videos and graphics. In the Ultra era, raw power is more than just an issue. limit for him. These are issues that Apple will never be able to solve.
(Alex didn’t hear any annoying fan noise from the M2 Ultra model either, and you don’t usually hear it from the M1 Ultra either.)
Don’t get me wrong. The faster the better. This is a great technical achievement. An improved version of the M1 Ultra. At first glance, this is a nice, albeit expensive, computer. Especially the improvement in graphics power is not surprising. It also serves its audience in the same way as last year’s Studio, without necessarily fixing any major hang-ups that may currently exist in your workflow, but with a similar but slightly faster experience and a similar physical experience. It seems to provide a sense of presence.
I love machines that make people’s jobs easier. Upgrading to this machine will give the busy professional a good chunk of his day back (every day, if you’re exporting all day, you’ll get half the export time), making business sense. It can become a thing. Still, it costs a lot, so in the end, this machine is less of a temptation for his M1 Ultra owner (other than the most lucrative company), and more for someone clinging to an older Mac Pro configuration. I believe there is. Those were big investments, but with every extra performance Studio can offer, audiences may be closer to jumping on Apple’s silicon train.
As we mentioned in our review of the MacBook Pro 16 with the M2 Max, Apple’s chips have reached a point where we can’t expect to see incredible performance leaps every year. Mac computers, like any other kind of computer, are getting much faster cycle by cycle. We expect the majority of Mac users to (correctly) wait several years before upgrading. And the Mac Studio is both a purchase consideration for power-hungry professionals and a public showcase for Apple’s engineering.
