Apple Explains Why There Isn’t an M4 Ultra Chip in Its Lineup (Yet)

Apple announced an updated Mac Studio this week, powered by somewhat mismatched M4 Max and M3 Ultra chip options. This has led to discussion as to why Apple decided to use an M3 Ultra chip instead of an M4 Ultra chip, and now Apple has explained the reasoning behind such a decision.

Apple told Ars Technica‘s Andrew Cunningham that we shouldn’t expect every generation of M-series chips for Macs to include an “Ultra” chip.

“When asked why the high-end Mac Studio was getting an M3 Ultra chip instead of an M4 Ultra, Apple told us that not every chip generation will get an ‘Ultra’ tier,” Cunningham wrote.

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So, does that mean we will never see an M4 Ultra chip released?

While the first three “M-series” chip generations boasted an Ultra tier — the M1 Ultra debuted in March 2022 and the M2 Ultra debuted in June 2023 — Apple may be looking at a different path going forward.

Apple is expected to update its Mac Pro desktop tower, which means Apple could debut the M4 Ultra as a part of that update. By powering the Mac Pro with an M4 Ultra, they could better differentiate it from the Mac Studio. The Mac Studio and Mac Pro received the M2 Ultra chip simultaneously in June 2023. The current Mac Pro is considered by many to be a poor option for high-end users, who pay thousands of dollars to opt for the Mac Pro over the Mac Studio.

While Apple’s statement doesn’t bode well for the M4 Ultra, it doesn’t entirely preclude the possibility that Apple will eventually include an M4 Ultra chip in its Apple Silicon lineup. Using the M4 Ultra in the Mac Pro would help the Pro stand out from the Mac Studio. However, it does possibly indicate that Apple may skip the M4 Ultra, as it may opt to update its most potent chips on a different (and lengthier) schedule than the other M-series processors.

The M3 Ultra is made up of twin M3 Max chips joined at the hip with a silicon interposer, similar to how Apple created the M1 Ultra and M2 Ultra. This means that everything on the chip is doubled; there are 32 CPU cores instead of 16, 80 GPU cores replacing 40, 32 Neural Engine cores instead of 16, and two ProRes video encoding engines in the place of one.

The M3 Ultra also supports 120Gbps Thunderbolt 5 (the M3 Max only supports Thunderbolt 4) and up to 512GB of RAM (the M3 Max RAM support maxes out at 128GB). The chip also supports hardware-accelerated ray-traced graphics, making it a good choice for graphics-intensive tasks like 3D rendering and gaming.

And, as reported by Numerama, the M4 Max lacks UltraFusion connectors, meaning that currently, the M4 Ultra would be impossible to make without re-engineering it.

An Apple spokesperson told Numerama that it decided to upgrade the Mac Studio now rather than wait for another generation.

So, what does all of this mean? Although Apple hasn’t explicitly stated that there won’t be an M4 Ultra release, the company’s comments imply that we won’t see an Ultra chip appear until the M5 generation. However, Apple may still have something else in the works; last year, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman said Apple was working on a higher-end M4 chip, code-named Hidra, that was being reserved exclusively for the Mac Pro. At the time, most assumed that would be the M4 Ultra, but it could turn out to be something entirely new.