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The big picture: Apple announced two new chips and two refreshed desktops today. The M6 is Apple's first 2nm chip. The M5 Ultra is its first quad-die design and the most powerful silicon the company has shipped. As for the desktop PCs, there are no significant new features on either machine, but this is a real spec and pricing bump. What's changed in the past couple of years is who these boxes are for, and whether you'll be able to get one.
The new M6 chip moves to TSMC's 2nm process and is the first Apple SoC to combine all three core types at once. The CPU has 12 cores: two "super cores," four performance cores, and six efficiency cores. Super cores themselves aren't new. Apple introduced them with the M5 Pro and M5 Max in March, and M6 is the first chip to run all three tiers together.
Apple claims to have the "world's fastest" single-threaded performance, 1.2x the multithreaded throughput of the M5, and 40% faster CPU performance than the M4. The GPU moves to 12 cores with a Neural Accelerator in each one, good for nearly 30% more peak GPU compute for AI than the M5.
