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Wednesday, March 16, 2022

Apple's M1 Ultra chip could upend the computer industry

Apple’s (AAPL) new M1 Ultra processor hits the market Friday. The chip, which you can get in the new $3,999 Mac Studio, is expected to be an absolute powerhouse that can take on the best of what Intel (INTC), AMD (AMD), and Nvidia (NVDA) have to offer.

That’s good news for consumers and nerdy tech editors looking for new gaming rigs and high-end systems to run video and photo editing software. It’s also a huge accomplishment for Apple, which only started offering laptop and desktop chips in 2020.

It also means a huge cost savings for people who want a monster computer that can tackle the most intense tasks. In fact, Apple says a fully-loaded Mac Studio with an M1 Ultra priced at $7,999 can smack around a $25,599 Mac Pro with an Intel chip and AMD graphics card when it comes to video encoding.

And yes, $7,999 is pricey, but it’s wild to get that kind of performance from a system that’s considerably less expensive than the Mac Pro.

“Apple is beating chip companies at their own game with the M1 series,” Wedbush analyst Dan Ives told Yahoo Finance.

Of course, what’s good for Apple is bad for its competitors. That’s because, according to experts, the M1 Ultra could ditch their Windows-based PCs in favor of Cupertino’s Macs.

“Apple has this internal silicon business. It's very capable, it's leading in that application processor design,” Gartner senior director analyst Jon Erensen told Yahoo Finance.

Apple’s chips give consumers an option beyond Windows

For years, users in need of a high-end computer capable of crunching huge amounts of data needed a powerful CPU coupled with a discrete graphics card. And Windows PCs provided that.

Sure, Apple sold systems with Intel chips and AMD graphics, but the company didn’t update them as frequently as PC makers that swapped out their computers with incremental processor upgrades every year. That made Windows machines the best option if you were looking for the most powerful computers on the market.

With the M1 Ultra, though, Apple has control over both the CPUs and GPUs it drops into its systems, which means it can update its Macs as it sees fit. It also means better integration between the M1 Ultra and Apple’s software, which should also be a boon for performance.

Apple created the M1 Ultra by snapping two M1 Max chips together using an architecture technology called UltraFusion.