M3 Ultra could have an 80-core GPU, twice as powerful as the M3 Max but only a few more cores than the M2 Ultra

Apple intends to launch more 3nm chips after the M3, M3 Pro and M3 Max, and the next version will be the company's most powerful M3 Ultra. Although previous reports suggested that this top-of-the-line Apple Silicon chip for the desktop has not yet entered wider testing, it could come with up to an 80-core GPU, the highest number the tech giant has ever used in one of its custom chipsets. Unfortunately, the difference in GPU cores is not that big compared to M2Ultra.

The highest configurations of M3Max are 16-core and 40-core, with an additional price of $500, while M3Ultra uses an 80-core GPU, which means it will have twice the number of cores than Apple's most powerful 3nm SoC to date. According to a report by Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman in the latest issue of the "PowerOn" newsletter, the reporter talked about the potential configuration of the M3 Ultra, saying that we may see a 32-core CPU paired with an 80-core GPU and 256GB of unified memory.

"This has a certain impact on Apple's yet-to-be-announced M3 Ultra. If Apple continues to double Ultra's CPU and graphics processor configurations, the Mac chip will have 32 CPU cores and 80 graphics processor cores. With Apple's increase in memory capacity, the option of 256GB of memory is completely conceivable."

One of the more impressive things about the M3 Ultra in this report is that Apple will add more CPU cores than the M2 Ultra, but the difference in GPU cores is not significant. Gurman did not elaborate on why Apple only increased the number of cores to an 80-core GPU, but judging from the performance of the M3 Max, there may be little reason to add more cores.

First, the 16-core GPU version of the M3 Max beat the M2 Ultra in Geekbench6's multi-core test, and its GPU was only slightly worse than the notebook RTX 4080 in GFXBench's test. Using Apple's "UltraFusion" bus and combining two M3Max chips into one M3Ultra, we can see incredible performance gains without increasing the number of GPU cores unnecessarily.

Unfortunately, since the next Apple Silicon model hasn't entered wider testing yet, we can't comment on the performance of the unreleased SoC, and we'll have to treat this report with caution, at least for now.