Apple on Tuesday unveiled two new processors—the M5 Ultra and M6 chips—which will power its latest Mac mini and Mac Studio models.

Apple described the M5 Ultra as its “most powerful chip ever.” It combines two dual-die M5 Max chips to create the company’s first quad-die processor, designed to handle demanding artificial intelligence workloads.

The chip features up to a 36-core CPU, an 80-core GPU and 1.2 TB/s of unified memory bandwidth, representing a 50 per cent increase over the M3 Ultra, which Apple launched about a year and a half ago.

While the M5 Ultra is aimed at professionals handling compute-intensive tasks such as complex 3D rendering, visual effects and advanced AI models, the Mac Studio powered by the chip is also expected to attract hobbyist AI developers.

Apple said its M6 chip, however, is designed more specifically for everyday users, offering performance suited to less demanding computing needs.

“Built using the cutting-edge 2 nm process, M6 combines a new CPU complex, two additional CPU and GPU cores, a Dual 16-core Neural Engine, and more unified memory bandwidth to power through workloads with amazing energy efficiency,” Apple vice president of Silicon Engineering Sri Santhanam said in a press release.

The M6 features a 12-core CPU, two more cores than the M5, and delivers nearly 30 per cent higher peak GPU compute for AI workloads. Apple said the improvement enables faster prompt processing when running large language models directly on the device.

“With these frameworks and new chips, developers can run and fine-tune large AI models locally on their Mac,” Apple wrote in a press release. “Apple’s developer tools and frameworks automatically optimize performance across the CPU, GPU, and Neural Engine, and give developers the ability to use Apple Foundation Models, App Intents to tap into Apple Intelligence features, or their own proprietary AI models to build and run powerful AI workloads entirely on device.”

Apple has lagged behind competitors in developing its own proprietary AI models, with its long-awaited Siri upgrade reportedly powered by Google’s Gemini technology.

However, the company has maintained an advantage in on-device processing, enabling users to access features such as Face ID and Touch ID more securely.

Keeping such sensitive data on the device also reduces the privacy risks associated with sending it to the cloud for processing.