Mac Pro Mac Studio Rumors: M4 Ultra Expectations

Apple’s high-performance Mac models, including the Mac Studio and Mac Pro, are expected to get a significant upgrade in 2025. Here’s how powerful we expect them to be.

Upgrading the Mac to M4 chips in late 2024 involved updates to half the Mac lineup, with only three models remaining to be updated. This short list includes MacBook Airthe Mac Studio and the Mac Pro.

With the MacBook Air already on M3it’s the two high-performance models that lag surprisingly behind. Both the Mac Studio and Mac Pro are on the market. M2 generation of chips, and should definitely benefit from an upgrade.

Here’s what the rumor mill has said about the Mac Pro and Mac Studio and their potential upgrades.

A late arrival

Probably the biggest question regarding incoming updates is when to expect them to actually arrive. Unfortunately, the rumors are pessimistic on this subject.

The most obvious time for Apple to present new versions of its powerful Macs is to WWDC 2025. It’s already happened, with Apple introducing the best Macs to an appreciative developer audience.

This is also after the planned launch of the MacBook Air M4 earlier this year. Updating the latest non-Max and non-Ultra product line would allow the Ultra versions to be presented as the last of the M4 generation.

Previous rumors earlier in 2024 insisted that the Pro and Studio models would not receive an update until mid-2025. Bloomberg following later say that a release of the models in the second half of 2025 was likely.

It’s entirely plausible that Apple could offer an update to M4 for models at WWDC for a real release later in the year.

Either way, it will take a few more months for the releases to become a reality for users.

Changes without a chip, or not

As with a new product update, it’s possible that Apple could also incorporate design changes at the same time. It’s a small chance though, since Apple tends to reuse the same design over multiple generations before releasing a clean design.

Bloomberg insisted in August 2024 that at least one of the incoming launches will feature a “radical change” from the current design. The problem is that the prediction was before the revised version was published. Mac-miniand this could have been the model Mark Gurman was talking about, since he wasn’t specific about the model changes.

Gurman’s predictions opened the door for other models to get updates, including the Mac Studio and Mac Pro. But that remains a very slim chance.

The Mac Studio has been around for two generations with its current design, making an update unlikely. It’s quite compact for a high-performance device, but it seems unlikely that Apple will do anything radical with the design at this point.

The Mac Pro, however, has undergone more frequent intergenerational changes, although it is also in its second generation for the current design. However, it is likely more likely that the Mac Pro will get a redesign due to the drastic change in internals from the Intel model to the Intel model. Apple Silicon version.

With such a significant architectural change, it’s plausible that Apple could come up with a new case design. One that still allows scalability of the model, but possibly in a smaller form.

So while both are likely to feel like spec updates rather than massive revisions, the focus shifts to what we can expect from the chip updates.

If Apple follows what it did for the M2 generations, we can expect M4 Max and M4 Ultra models of Mac Studio and an M4 Ultra Mac Pro.

We already know what the M4 Max will bring to Mac Studio consumers, since the chip is already available in the Mac Pro. Early testing of the M4 Max has demonstrated that the latest iteration is significantly more powerful than the M2 Ultra in both single-core and multi-core performance.

Since we know the specifications and benchmark results of the Max and Ultra versions for M1 and M2, we could potentially extrapolate the results for M4.

The M1 and M2 Ultra chips are much faster than the M1 and M2 Max for a simple reason: Apple used two Max chips to create an Ultra. Using an interconnect, Apple connected two Max chips and called it Ultra, doubling the CPU and GPU cores, memory allocations and other elements.

This would naturally include a doubling of the Neural Engine cores in the Ultra models, from 16 cores in the Max chips to 32 in the Ultra.

There should also be a considerable improvement when it comes to memory capacities, as Ultra models tend to have much higher amounts available. For example, the M2 Max Mac Studio has up to 96 GB of available memory, while the M2 Ultra version offers up to 192 GB.

With the M4 Max configurable to 128 GB in the MacBook Prothis could mean at least 256GB capacity in M4 Ultra devices.

Of course, this doesn’t directly mean that the Ultra models are twice as fast as the Max versions, but it does mean that the differences in results should be fairly predictable. That is, if Apple uses the same techniques every generation.

We know from Geekbench that the M1 Ultra and M2 Ultra’s single-core results are within a few points of their Max equivalents. This makes sense since Geekbench only measures the performance of the fastest core, regardless of quantity.

When it comes to multi-core performance, there’s typically a 45% improvement between the Max and Ultra when it comes to the highest performing versions of each chip. That is, the 20-core M1 Ultra versus the 10-core M1 Max and the 24-core M2 Ultra versus the 12-core M2 Max in Mac Studio.

The same technique can also be used for Metal results, used to measure GPU performance.

The M1 Max’s Metal score of 105,000 for its 32-core GPU goes up to over 161,000 for the Ultra’s 64-core GPU, a 53% improvement. This is the same figure when we go from 145,000 to 222,000 for the 38-core GPU of the M2 Max and the 76-core version of the M2 Ultra.

Using these improvement percentages, which are quite similar across generations, we can extrapolate using the Mac M4 in the MacBook Pro. The one referenced here has a 16-core CPU and a 40-core GPU, so the M4 Ultra’s equivalent would be a 32-core CPU and an 80-core GPU.

Benchmarks for the 16-inch MacBook Pro put its single-core mark at 3,930. It’s reasonable to expect the Ultra to achieve a similar score.

For multi-core, the M4 Max comes in at 25,735. With a 45% improvement, the M4 Ultra could score 37,315.

The Metal score of 187,645 in the M4 Max could also increase by 53% to 287,096 in the M4 Ultra.

All of these extrapolations are based on the Mac Studio, since the Mac Pro only uses the M2 Ultra chip. Checking the numbers shows that the M2 Ultra in the Mac Pro is comparable to the same spec chips in the Mac Studio.

Since they are quite similar, you can expect similar performance levels in the M4 Ultra on Mac Pro as you would see in the Mac Studio version. That is to say very high levels of performance.

A questionable interconnection

This extrapolation is theoretical and based on whether Apple continues to use its existing techniques to make its powerful Ultra chips. Some rumors call this into question, and things might be different this time around.

The lack of an M3 Ultra version has led some to take a closer look at the M3 Max chip, with some reports insisting that the M3 Max did not have the capability to use an UltraFusion interconnect. At the time, it was thought that the M3 Ultra could have become a single discrete chip, instead of combining two.

Obviously, no one outside of Apple knows whether the M3 Ultra would have been released as a standalone chip or not. However, these reports also cannot be interpreted to mean that Apple is moving away from interconnects altogether.

Given that Apple controls its chip roadmap, it’s entirely plausible that it decided against an M3 Ultra version and simply designed the M3 Max with that in mind. It’s possible that UltraFusion will return for the M4 Ultra, with Apple operating as usual.

One report that seems to help the interconnect usage narrative is that of an apparent chip rollback.

In December, it was claimed that Apple had discarded the development of a high-performance Mac chip, which could have been called “M4 Extreme”. The concept of the chip was to take the concept of interconnection further, by assembling four M4 Max chips.

If this were to be a reality, that would mean a chip with a 64-core CPU, a 160-core GPU, a 64-core neural engine, and a maximum memory capacity of at least 512 GB.

Keeping in mind that such a chip would be a boon for AI development, thanks to such a concentration of Neural Engine and GPU cores, this could well end up becoming a reality at some point.

It remains to be seen whether this time would coincide with that of the M4 Ultra.