After beginning its transition into its own M-series chips back in 2020 with the MacBook Pro and Mac Mini, Apple finally completes the move to its own silicon with the Mac Pro having an M2 Ultra processor and PCIe expansion–the latter being the first Apple silicon-powered product to have room for upgrades.
Before we talk about the new Mac Pro, let’s talk about the M2 Ultra first. This new chip is based on a second-generation 5mm platform and consists of two M2 Max chips that are combined using Apple’s UltraFusion technology to maximize performance. By using a silicon interposer to connect the two M2 Max chips, you get seamless connectivity between them with over 2.5TB/s of low-latency interprocessor bandwidth.
As the largest chip in the M2 series, the Ultra has 134 billion transistors (20 billion more than the M1 Ultra), and supports up to 192GB of memory. It also has a whopping 800GB/s of bandwidth, which explains why Apple was able to incorporate PCIe expansion on the new Mac Pro. The key structure of the M2 Ultra consists of 16 high-performance cores and 8 high-efficiency cores, while the GPU can be configured with either 60 or 76 cores depending on the user’s needs. With that much power, the M2 Ultra can playback up to 22 streams of 8K ProRes 422 video and can support as many as six Pro Display XDRs.
Speaking of expansion, the M2 Ultra Mac Pro has 6 full-length PCIe 4.0 slots (2 x16 and 4 x8), a half-length x4 PCIe 3.0 slot with a preinstalled Apple I/O card, and a total of 300w of auxiliary power (2 6-pin 75w and 1 8-pin 150w). This makes it the most upgradeable Apple silicon Mac to date.
Of course, with those prices, be prepared to spend a fortune: the tower version starts at Php 449,990, while the rackmount version starts at Php 479,990.
