Apple’s New Mac Studio Supports Up to 512GB of Unified Memory

Apple has unveiled the M5 Ultra chip and the first Mac to feature it: the upgraded, super-powerful Mac Studio.

With the death of the Mac Pro earlier this year, the Mac Studio is now Apple’s sole professional-grade desktop computer, and the updated Mac Studio aims to live up to that billing with massive performance improvements.

The new Mac Studio, Apple’s “most powerful Mac,” is available with the excellent M5 Max that debuted earlier this year in the upgraded MacBook Pro and the all-new M5 Ultra. In both cases, Apple promises big performance leaps over the M4 Max- and M3 Ultra-powered Mac Studio.

“Mac Studio is the ultimate desktop for on-device AI and the world’s most demanding pro workflows, relied on by users for its tremendous performance and extensive pro connectivity, all in a quiet, compact design that sits right on your desk — and today, we’re pushing the boundaries even further,” says Johny Srouji, Apple’s chief hardware officer.

“With the powerful M5 Max and the incredible capabilities of M5 Ultra, Mac Studio ushers in a new era of desktop computing, delivering huge performance gains for pro workloads and AI inference with frontier-class models. By integrating Neural Accelerators directly into the GPU and offering massive amounts of high-bandwidth unified memory, the new Mac Studio is our most powerful Mac ever.”

Overall, the refreshed Mac Studio lineup promises up to 4.3 times faster AI performance, up to two times faster storage, up to 1.8 times faster graphics, and up to 1.3 times faster CPU performance. There’s also higher memory bandwidth.

Max Studio With M5 Max

The Mac Studio with M5 Max features an 18-core CPU, up to 40 GPU cores (each with Neural Accelerators), and up to 128GB of unified memory. The machine has up to 614GB/s of unified memory bandwidth.

Apple says the Mac Studio with M5 Max is “ideal for musicians, photographers, software engineers, and designers pushing real-time 3D and motion graphics.”

The Mac Studio with M5 Max has third-generation hardware-accelerated ray tracing, promising better graphics performance. Its powerful Media Engine has hardware-accelerated H.264, HEVC, ProRes, and AV1 decoding. Apple says the M5 Max-powered Mac Studio is great for color grading and editing uncompressed 8K footage.

Apple says Magic Mask performance in Blackmagic’s DaVinci Resolve Studio is up to 5.3 times faster than the Mac Studio with M1 Max and up to three times faster than the Mac Studio with M4 Max.

Mac Studio With M5 Ultra

The Mac Studio with M5 Ultra has an up to 36-core CPU, up to an 80-core GPU, and up to 512GB of unified memory, which Apple fairly describes as “staggering.” It is a Mac designed for the most extreme professional workloads.

“There is no other chip like M5 Ultra, which delivers the highest levels of performance and massive amounts of unified memory, enabling pros to push the limits of what they can accomplish on a single machine,” Apple says.

“Filmmakers can color-grade uncompressed 8K footage in real time, VFX artists can render complex simulations, and data scientists can train local AI models on expansive datasets.”

The Mac Studio with M5 Ultra has up to 1.3 times faster multithreaded performance than the Mac Studio with M3 Ultra. It’s also the first Ultra Mac with Neural Accelerators across every core, delivering 4.3 times faster peak AI compute performance than Apple’s last Ultra chip, the M3 Ultra.

As of now, the M3 Ultra remains the most powerful chip PetaPixel has ever tested for graphics-intensive workflows, although the M5 Ultra is almost certainly going to crush it. Apple says the M5 Ultra is its most powerful Apple silicon GPU ever. Graphics performance is up to 1.8 times faster than before.

The Media Engine is better, too. It can play up to 33 streams of 8K ProRes 422 at 30 frames per second simultaneously.

Other Improvements for Both New Mac Studio Desktops

Both models feature Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6, a first for Mac, and feature Thunderbolt 5 connectivity across the board with up to 120GB/s bandwidth per port. With Thunderbolt 5, users can take advantage of the fastest external storage on the market today, plus PCIe expansion chassis and various hub solutions for professional workflows.

Thunderbolt 5 also enables multiple Mac Studio machines to be clustered, delivering up to three times faster performance for distributed AI inference compared to a single machine.

The new Mac Studio also has a next-generation SSD architecture built on PCIe Gen 6.

The Mac Studio supports up to eight displays, including four Studio Display XDR monitors at full 5K resolution and 120Hz refresh rates.

Pricing and Availability


The Mac Studio with M5 Max starts at $2,499 with an 18-core CPU and 32-core GPU. Upgrading the GPU to 40 cores adds $300 to the price tag. The base model ships with 36GB of RAM, while the 40-core GPU version starts with 48GB of RAM. Both versions ship with a 512GB SSD.

A maxed-out Mac Studio with M5 Max, including 128GB of unified memory and an 8TB SSD, is $8,899.

The Mac Studio with M5 Ultra starts at $5,499. This version has a 30-core CPU and 64-core GPU, 96GB of unified memory, and a 1TB SSD.

The version with a 36-core CPU and 80-core GPU starts at $6,799 and includes 96GB of unified memory and a 1TB SSD.

A fully maxed-out Mac Studio with M5 Ultra, including the upgraded chip, 256GB of unified memory, and a 16TB SSD, is $18,299.

The Mac Studio with M5 Ultra with 512GB of unified memory is not currently available to preorder, and Apple says it will be available in October. It is unclear how much it will cost, but it will obviously not be cheap.

All other new Mac Studio SKUs will be available on September 22.

Image creditsApple