Apple's M1 Ultra Chip Is Almost Three Times Bigger Than Intel & AMD CPUs, But It's Still Lagging In Performance

RJ Pierce, Tech Times 19 March 2022, 09:03 am

The Apple M1 Ultra has been shown in its full, physical glory by a recent teardown. And boy, it is a very big chip.

(Photo : Apple Newsroom)

This aforementioned teardown is the first ever to showcase the physical size of the new Apple SoC. And in comparison to modern AMD Ryzen and Intel chips, the M1 Ultra is almost three times bigger. But while this might look a bit weird, the massive package size for the M1 Ultra has its purpose.

According to WCCFTech, the size is due to Apple's decision to fuse two M1 Max chips and a massive 64-core GPU, alongside all I/O and the memory. It is basically an all-in-one chip featuring the CPU, GPU, and memory in a single package.

Here is the teardown of a recently launched Mac Studio, which features the M1 Ultra, courtesy of tech YouTube channel MaxTech. Be sure to check from the 15:56 mark:

As you can see in the video, the sheer size of Apple's M1 Ultra caught the reviewer unaware, but that's not everything. He was also in awe of how Apple built its entire cooling solution to tame the SoC. A chip with so much silicon packed into it will require some serious cooling, so the cooling solution looks the way it is.

Size Doesn't Matter

But despite all, the M1 Ultra is perhaps one of the best examples of the phrase "size doesn't matter." That's because even if it does pack a massive amount of power, it still lags behind modern AMD Ryzen and Intel CPUs in terms of performance.

Benchmark numbers provided by tech YouTuber Dave2D show that while the M1 Ultra does deliver beastly performance seen in the most demanding creative tasks, it still lags behind a couple of AMD and Intel's top dogs: the Ryzen 9 5950X and the Alder Lake Core i9-12900K. The only benchmark where it beat the two mainstream desktop chips is GeekBench 5:

Another benchmark from YouTuber named Matthew Moniz mostly tells the same story. He tested the M1 Ultra-equipped Mac Studio against a Macbook Pro 14 and a desktop with a 12900K and RTX 3080 Ti and found that the new Apple SoC still trailed behind the Alder Lake system in all benchmarks.

As for the graphics, it still failed to live up to Apple's performance claims. The current top-dog GPU is NVIDIA's RTX 3090, and it proved to be too much of a competition for the M1 Ultra's 64-core graphics chip. According to Tom's Hardware, the Apple SoC got absolutely demolished by the 3090 in Geekbench 5 and a gaming test featuring "Shadow Of The Tomb Raider."

Apple's Performance Claims Still Hold Not Much Weight

What this means is pretty straightforward: Apple's claims of the M1 Ultra being the "world's most powerful chip for a personal computer" is a little bogus-at least for now. But for the chip's target audience, this likely won't matter as much.

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Written by RJ Pierce