Apple's Enormous 20-Core M1 Ultra Processor, the Brains in the New Mac Studio Machine

upstart writes:

Meet Apple's Enormous 20-Core M1 Ultra Processor, the Brains in the New Mac Studio Machine:

Apple on Tuesday announced its highest-end M1 Mac processor to date, a model that links two M1 Max chips together into a single package with 20 processing cores, 64 graphics cores, and support for up to 128GB of memory. The chip, with a remarkable 114 billion transistors, debuted at Apple's March product launch event and powers the high-end $3,999 configuration of the new Mac Studio desktop computer.

The chip uses dedicated circuitry on last year's M1 Max with a high-speed silicon link called UltraFusion to marry the two processors together without a complicated design that would mean problems for programmers, Apple said. It's emblematic of the increasing push across the semiconductor industry to use packaging technology to link smaller chip elements into one larger processor.

UltraFusion employs a technique called a silicon interposer, essentially a layer in the chip package with 10,000 high-speed links between the two slices of silicon. "This is a super clever approach to maximize a mature design," said Creative Strategies analyst Ben Bajarin. Compared to the first-generation M1, the M1 Ultra has seven times as many transistors, the basic electronic building block in a processor.

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