Our first impression of the Mac Studio was a positive one, but the M1 Max model we tested left us a little confused as to who it’s for. Given that it offered such similar performance to the M1 Max-powered Apple MacBook Pro 16-Inch, the lower-tier Mac Studio seemed a lot like repackaging existing capabilities rather than a major step forward for the Mac desktop.
But we knew we hadn’t gotten the full picture, since the Mac Studio offers far more than just a new box for the M1 Max. It’s also the first (and so far, the only) Mac to get the M1 Ultra, Apple’s top M1 CPU.
After days of testing in PC Labs, we can now definitively say how much more powerful the M1 Ultra is compared with the M1 Max. And, more important, we know which Mac Studio we’re likely to be recommending to people who need real power.
M1 Processor Lineup: Three Chips, Lots of Versions
When Apple announced its intentions of leaving Intel processors behind back in 2020, the stated aim was to “transition the Mac to [Apple’s] world-class custom silicon to deliver industry-leading performance and powerful new technologies,” and to “establish a common architecture across all Apple products.”
That journey started with the introduction of the M1 processor in the 2020 MacBook Air and Mac mini desktop. This was the first of Apple’s new in-house Mac processors, and the results were impressive.
First, the company shifted to an entirely new CPU architecture, pivoting from Intel’s x86 to ARM, the same technology Apple was already offering in its iPhone and iPad devices. ARM uses a simpler instruction set than x86, offering an immediate win in power efficiency, and giving Apple the chance to tailor the hardware and software to work perfectly together.
It also was Apple’s move to a unified system-on-chip (SoC) for the entire Mac platform. Instead of discrete components handling processing, graphics, and memory, Apple’s new design put all of those functions onto a single piece of silicon, bringing those components much closer together for additional efficiency gains.
The M1 chip debuted on Apple’s entry-level systems: In addition to the Air and the mini, it’s also available on the 13-inch MacBook Pro, and the 24-inch iMac desktop.
The M1 was followed up shortly after by the M1 Pro and the M1 Max, which expanded on the M1 by increasing the number of transistors to 33.7 billion and 57 billion, respectively.
The M1 Pro adds support for up to 10 CPU cores and as many as 16 GPU cores. It also supports up to 32GB of unified memory, and it bumps up the memory bandwidth to 200GBps. With an integrated ProRes encoder and decoder, it’s well-suited to video editing, and it supports two external displays for desktop multitasking.
The M1 Max takes this a step further, taking the same 10-core CPU and adding up to 32 GPU cores, as much as 64GB of unified memory, and 400GBps of memory bandwidth. It keeps the built-in ProRes accelerators and expands the external-device support with a Thunderbolt 4 controller and up to four external displays.
As a standalone chip, the M1 Max is the best Apple has to offer for MacBook Pro laptops, and is available in top models of both the 14-inch and 16-inch versions.
Finally, this month Apple introduced the new M1 Ultra, which takes things to the next level by performing an unexpected trick: It’s actually two M1 Max chips in one.
What Is the Apple M1 Ultra?
In the M1 family of processors, the M1 Ultra is the apex predator. Not content to merely expand the original M1 with additional processing cores or graphics cores, it literally doubles the power by combining two M1 Max chips onto a single silicon die, with a special interconnect called UltraFusion. This high-bandwidth interconnect boasts 2.5 terabytes of bandwidth—four times that of the next competing interconnect—allowing the bifurcated design to function as a single processor on the software side.
And doubling the M1 Max means doubling pretty much everything about the chip. It’s now a 20-core CPU with 16 high-performance cores and four high-efficiency cores. Graphics are handled by a powerful 64-core GPU, and memory bandwidth is expanded to a whopping 800GBps. And, double the chip means double the RAM, with up to 128GB of unified memory.
Unlike the rest of the M1 series, it appears that the M1 Ultra won’t be coming to the MacBook line, making it a desktop-only option. As of this writing, the M1 Ultra is only available in the upticked versions of the Mac Studio desktop.
The doubled-up CPU requires more efficient cooling than the single-chip M1 Max, prompting Apple to pair it with a different, all-copper cooling system. Though it’s configured just like it is on the M1 Max version, with the same bottom-up air flow, and the same blower and ducting, the lower-tier cooling system uses a heat sink and vapor chamber of aluminum, whereas the M1 Ultra uses a more thermally efficient copper heat sink and chamber.
And that’s a difference you can feel, with the M1 Ultra version of the Mac Studio weighing in at 2 pounds heavier than the M1 Max model, all but guaranteeing that the Ultra will remain deskbound for the foreseeable future.
Benchmarking the Apple M1 Ultra: How Much Faster Is It?
The port selection and cooling systems aside, the biggest differences expected between the single-chip M1 Max and the doubled-up M1 Ultra versions of the Mac Studio are seen in the raw performance.
Below we’ll run through our benchmark results. We tested two versions of the Mac Studio, one with the M1 Max, and one with the M1 Ultra. Here are the basic spec loadouts of the two machines…
CPU-Centric Tests
The first test we run is Maxon’s Cinebench R23. Using a CPU-driven rendering process, this test maxes out the capabilities of a multi-core processor over many minutes. It favors multi-core and multi-threaded processing, and the final number is a good measure of total processor capability, giving us a clear picture of how the M1 Ultra stacks up against the M1 Max. We saw scores nearly double, jumping from the 12,371 of the M1 Max to 24,216 points using the M1 Ultra.
Another processor-heavy test we use is Primate Labs’ Geekbench Pro, which simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Geekbench single-core scores stayed similar, as expected, given that the M1 Max and M1 Ultra use the same individual core designs. But the multicore scores show what a difference the total package makes, with the M1 Max Mac Studio scoring 12,725 and the M1 Ultra delivering a scorching 23,918 points.
For a more reality-based measure of processing power, we use Handbrake 1.4 and the Blender Foundation movie Tears of Steel. Transcoding that 12-minute 4K H.264 video clip down to 1080p is a terrific method to test how well a system can manage a genuine, hard task because it uses so much of the CPU. While Handbrake tests aren’t necessarily an exact test of raw performance—the decode and encode portions of the test can be influenced by factors other than hardware—the test is still a useful one, if only because it shows easily comparable performance in a very common real-world task.
The M1 Max version of the Studio notched a respectable 4 minutes 49 seconds in this test, holding its own against other high-end mini PCs and coming in more than 3 minutes faster than the 8-minute average we’ve seen on regular M1 Macs like the Mac mini or the 24-inch iMac. But the Studio with M1 Ultra blew that result out of the water, cutting the time down to 2 minutes and 34 seconds. That’s not just the fastest time we’ve ever gotten on a Mac, it’s the quickest time we’ve seen, period.
In more demanding situations, like rendering 3D models, the added processing and graphics muscle really showed its value. Testing in Blender, we saw render times drastically cut, whether it was our CPU- or GPU-specific tests. In the CPU-heavy version of the Blender test, the Mac Studio M1 Ultra finished its render in 1 minute and 53 seconds (1:53), compared to the M1 Max configuration’s 3:25. The GPU version was equally impressive, with the M1 Ultra cranking through the test in 1 minute 51 seconds (1:51), more than a minute and a half quicker than the M1 Max did (3:24).
One additional test that we run on Macs, despite our benchmarking extension not running natively on M1 hardware, is Adobe Photoshop. (We use the PugetBench for Photoshop testing extension from workstation maker Puget Systems.) Given the quirks of Rosetta 2 emulation, it doesn’t serve as a 1-to-1 performance test compared to Windows machines, but it becomes a superb test of Rosetta 2 emulation performance, which is a must-have for many professional users. And in this instance, the M1 Ultra has a clear, if not dominant, advantage, scoring 934 points as compared to the M1 Max’s score of 906.
Browser Tests
To expand the testing options for Macs, we also turn to a number of browser-based benchmark tests. Here, we will compare the two Mac Studios, and for context, also include a bunch of recent years’ Mac desktop and laptop models…
We start with JetStream 2, which combines 64 JavaScript and WebAssembly benchmarks to measure a browser’s suitability for advanced web applications. We also use Principled Technologies’ CrXPRT (a suite of simulated Chrome OS productivity apps) and more recent WebXPRT 3 (a browser-based test of HTML and JavaScript throughput).
In these tests, we saw far less variation between the M1 Max and the M1 Ultra versions of the Mac Studio, and in some instances, the M1 Ultra fell a half step behind its single-CPU sibling.
In JetStream 2, the higher-powered M1 Ultra scored 233 points, versus the M1 Max model, which scored 265. Both are significantly higher scores than you’ll see on models with a basic M1 CPU, but the horsepower of the M1 Ultra doesn’t translate into improved browser performance, even in advanced uses. We saw a similar result in WebXPRT 3, where the M1 Ultra easily outperformed other Macs, but the M1 Max delivered the best score of the bunch.
The exception in this batch of tests was Basemark Web 3.0. Both the M1 Max and M1 Ultra versions of the Mac Studio outpaced other Mac laptops and desktops, but here the M1 Ultra had an edge, scoring 1,769 points to the M1 Max’s 1,622 points.
Graphics Tests
The biggest difference in performance between the M1 Max and the M1 Ultra stemmed from the jump from 32 GPU cores to 64 GPU cores. With twice the horsepower rendering visuals, the Mac Studio with M1 Ultra dominated almost every graphics test we ran.
In 3DMark Wildlife Extreme, running in Unlimited mode to accommodate the Apple Studio Display’s 5K resolution, the M1 Max version of the Mac Studio offered up an impressive score of 20,348 points. But the M1 Ultra model blew past that with an even more impressive 35,019 points. Wildlife Extreme isn’t part of our regular set of tests for PCs, but since the test offers M1 compatibility, we will be adding it to our test lineup for Mac laptops and desktops.
The test we do run every time is GFXBench, a cross-platform GPU performance benchmark that stress-tests both low-level routines like texturing and high-level, game-like image rendering. Both Aztec Ruins (1440p) and Car Chase (1080p) exercise graphics and compute shaders, but the former relies on the OpenGL application programming interface (API), while the latter uses hardware tessellation. We record the results in frames per second (fps); higher numbers are better.
Any system that delivers more than 300fps in a test like the demanding GFXBench Aztec Ruins test offers solid graphics performance, but the M1 Ultra goes well beyond this, scoring 484fps.
Finally, there’s gaming, which we test with Rise of the Tomb Raider—an older game, to be sure, but one of the few that runs natively on M1 Macs and still offers the built-in benchmark we prefer to use. And here the M1 Ultra offers some of the best performance we’ve seen, notching 143 frames per second (fps) edging ahead of the M1 Max version’s 128 fps and leaving older M1-based models in the dust, like the Mac mini (42fps).
It’s not enough to fix Apple’s spotty overall gaming support, but you’ll definitely see the best performance using the M1 Ultra’s 64-core GPU.
M1 Max vs. M1 Ultra: Picking the Perfect Processor
If you’re in the market for a new Mac, the Mac Studio with M1 Ultra is the most powerful model sold for under $10,000, and it wins by a large margin. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that the M1 Ultra is the best option for you.
The M1 Ultra is perfect for people that need maximum power, to enable professional-grade video editing or other media-heavy workflows. The Studio is, after all, meant for the professional studio, whether that’s for photographers, animators, sound engineers, video makers, or software devs. In these instances, the power and compact capability of the Mac Studio make the higher-tier M1 Ultra models a no-brainer.
But if you can’t afford to plunk down $3,999 or more for the M1 Ultra-equipped model, then the decision-making gets a bit murky, because the less-expensive Mac Studio uses the M1 Max, the same processor offered on the MacBook Pro.
The M1 Max configuration of the MacBook Pro 16-inch starts at $3,499, with the M1 Max processor, 32-core GPU, 32GB of memory, and 1TB of SSD storage. A similarly outfitted Mac Studio sells for $2,399—the base model sells for $1,999, but it offers a lower GPU core count, and the base storage is only 512GB. Even so, with equal hardware, the MacBook Pro is still more expensive.
Or, it is until you factor in the additional cost of the display and peripherals. Throw in the Apple Studio Display ($1,599), the black-keyed Magic Keyboard with Touch ID and Numeric Keypad ($199), and the black Magic Mouse ($99), and you’ll total up to $4,296 for the same core functionality.
Which speaks to the conclusion we drew in our initial review of the Mac Studio with M1 Max: It’s a powerful desktop, but not more powerful than the M1 Max-equipped MacBook Pro 16-inch, and that has the added benefit of being usable on the go, unlike the stationary Studio, compact though it may be.
But our testing makes one more thing abundantly clear. If you want the best Mac around, and are willing to pay for it, the Mac Studio with M1 Ultra is a true powerhouse of a machine, and the best power-per-dollar option in the Mac lineup today if you run apps that can leverage its CPU’s dual-design nature.
