If some were waiting for the announcement of M2 chips, it is finally an M1 Ultra SOC that Apple announced yesterday. The latter benefits from a multi-chip design, where, if we had to summarize, Apple has assembled 2 Apple M1 Max SoCs using its own interconnect technology named as UltraFusion. The latter would have a bandwidth of 2.5 Tbps, allowing the two chips to work without any bottleneck.
A CPU part that seems really powerful
Obviously, Apple presented the M1 Ultra as the most powerful processor in the world… But with some objective arguments to support this appellation (before independent tests are conducted). The reported performance figures are obtained under GeekBench. The Apple M1 Ultra scores 1793 points in the single-core benchmark and 24055 points in the multi-core benchmark. In this test, the M1 Ultra was running at its full power envelope (maximum consumption). Apple chose to compare it to Intel’s 12900K. In single-core, the Intel processor delivered a 14% higher score but lagged behind Apple’s SOC in multi-threaded tasks with a 20% lower performance. Let’s not forget that the new Apple SoC has 20 cores. 
Finally, the M1 Ultra SOC would easily outperform the 16-core AMD Ryzen 9 5950X in both single-core and multicore tests. The Ryzen 9 5950X scores 1553 points in single-core, which is 13% slower and 15257 points in multi-core test, which is 37% slower. Apple’s ultimate argument being to demonstrate that this level of performance is achieved with significantly lower power consumption than its two competitors Intel and AMD.
Apple M1 Ultra: A GPU part that is also interesting
Concerning the GPU part integrated into the Apple SoC, according to official communications, it offers the same performance as an RTX 3060 Ti when it runs with 1/3 of the maximum theoretical power. At full load, it would offer similar performance to NVIDIA’s RTX 3090 while consuming 200W less power. Apple also showed comparative figures against the Radeon Pro W6900X on its existing Mac Pro solutions. The Mac Studio with the M1 Ultra SoC delivers up to 80 percent faster performance than the Radeon Pro solution. On paper, this is clearly impressive, but it should be put into perspective with independent and objective tests. Last but not least, to get the performance of this M1 Ultra SoC, you’ll have to buy the new Mac Studio, whose first price is well over 4000€ (with the right SoC).
