Apple Ships Its First 2-Nanometer Chip and a Quad-Die M5 Ultra Aimed at Local AI Workloads

Apple introduced the M6 and the M5 Ultra, and the part that matters most for anyone running models locally is the memory and neural silicon, not the central processing unit (CPU) specifications Apple emphasizes. The M6 is Apple's first chip on a 2-nanometer process. It carries a 12-core CPU, a 12-core graphics processing unit (GPU) with a neural accelerator inside each core, and a dual 16-core Neural Engine that Apple says reaches twice the peak compute of the prior generation. Memory bandwidth is up to 170 gigabytes per second, which Apple describes as about 10 percent above the M5 and 2.5 times the M1.

That bandwidth figure is the number that governs token generation speed for a memory-bound decode loop. A 10 percent generational gain is modest against a claimed doubling of neural throughput, which tells you where the bottleneck for local large language model (LLM) inference on this class of part still sits.

The M5 Ultra is the structurally new design. Apple's UltraFusion interconnect now joins two dual-die M5 Max chips into a quad-die package, the first of its kind in the line. It keeps a 32-core Neural Engine and, for the first time in an Ultra-class part, puts neural accelerators in the GPU. Apple claims up to 4.3 times the peak AI compute of the M3 Ultra.

Both are peak-compute claims from a vendor, expressed in operations rather than tokens per second on a named model at a named quantization. Apple published no results on MLPerf (the industry's standard AI benchmark suite) and no comparison against a discrete GPU running the same open-weight model, so the practical question of how many tokens per second a developer gets from, for example, a 70-billion-parameter model at 4-bit precision remains unanswered by the announcement itself.

The M6 debuts in a refreshed Mac mini alongside an M5 Pro option, with Apple citing up to four times faster AI performance and 40 percent faster CPU performance than the model it replaces. The M5 Ultra goes into the Mac Studio. Apple's framing is explicit about where it wants the workload to run: its developer tools let applications call Apple Foundation Models or a developer's own proprietary models entirely on device.