Apple has driven the prices of desktop Macs for professionals to dizzying heights in recent years: the basic version of the iMac Pro costs over 5000 euros, the Mac Pro, which was relaunched in 2019, starts at around 6500 euros. With a little more memory and cores, buyers can quickly break the 10,000 euro mark.
With the new Mac Studio, Apple is now turning back the spiral: the entry-level price is around 2300 euros – similar to the Power Macs and Mac Pros in the old cheese grating tower. The Mac Studio even has connections on the front, which Apple hasn’t had for almost ten years.
M1 chip with up to 20 cores
In contrast to the expensive Mac Pro, the Macstudio do not expand internally, opening the case is not intended. But the new desktop Mac is not lacking in power: Even in the basic model, Apple has installed its own 10-core M1 Max processor with either 24 or 32 GPU cores. The new M1 Ultra makes its debut in a better-equipped variant, a 20-core processor with 48 or 64 GPU cores and up to 128 GB of RAM. However, doubling the cores also doubles the price: The Mac Studio with M1 Ultra costs at least 4600 euros. For the maximum equipment with 8 TB SSD and 128 GB RAM and 64 GPU cores, Apple requires 9200 euros – without keyboard and mouse.
The individual performance core is practically identical in Apple’s M1 SoC series, so single-thread benchmarks in Macs with M1 such as MacBook Air and Mac mini, M1 Pro and M1 Max in the MacBook Pro deliver almost identical values as in the M1 Ultra. However, as soon as demanding tasks are distributed over several cores, Pro, Max and especially Ultra show their strengths. This also applies to the comparison of the M1 Ultra with Intel’s Core i9-12900K or even AMD’s Ryzen Threadripper, as our benchmarks confirm: In the Geekbench 5 multithreading test, the M1 Ultra achieves a value of almost 24,000 and is thus above the Intel processor and relatively close to the Ryzen Threadripper 3970X.
Fast video export
With a special media engine, Apple’s M1 chip is designed for fast video export without overheating. The 4K export of a video project with several 8K video tracks from Final Cut Pro with Redcode RAW material took 227 seconds in our test on a highly upgraded Mac Pro (Intel Xeon with 24 cores and 384 GB RAM), on a MacBook Pro with M1 Pro (32 GB RAM) 159 seconds, on the Mac Studio with M1 Max (64 GB RAM) only 102 seconds and on the Mac Studio with M1 Ultra (128 GB RAM) finally 74 seconds: at least a third of the time.
In the Metal test, the M1 Ultra scored twice as high as the Mac Pro upgraded with two graphics cards. The Mac Pro was even defeated in most 3D shooting games running in the Rosetta emulation. The Mac Studio remained pleasantly quiet during the benchmarks at 0.2 sone and drew far less power than Intel Macs or PCs of a similar performance class.
- Meanwhile, Mac & i continues to test the two devices. You can read the detailed test of the Mac Studio with M1 Max and M1 Ultra in issue 2/2022, which will be available from April 7, 2022. The article also contains all measurement results for the connections, the integrated SSD, many other benchmarks relating to the CPU and GPU of the Mac Studio, assessments of the computer’s suitability for certain applications and recommendations on who should put the money together. We also tested Apple’s new Studio Display. We also detail the improvements in the M1 Ultra. Mac & i subscribers receive the test report in advance, it then also appears on heise+.
(lbe)