Apple's M4 Ultra chip has landed, and the numbers are extraordinary. After three weeks of testing across every benchmark we could throw at it, one conclusion is inescapable: the gap between Apple Silicon and the rest of the industry has never been wider.
The Numbers
In Cinebench 2024, the M4 Ultra scores 1,847 in single-core — a 23% improvement over the M3 Ultra. Multi-core performance tells an even more dramatic story: 28,400 points, surpassing AMD's Threadripper 7980X while consuming roughly one-third of the power.
GPU performance is where things get truly staggering. The M4 Ultra's 80-core GPU delivers 28 TFLOPS of compute — enough to run stable diffusion image generation at 4K resolution in real time, something that required a dedicated $3,000 GPU card just 18 months ago.
The Memory Story
Perhaps the most significant advancement is in unified memory architecture. With up to 512GB of unified memory running at 800GB/s bandwidth, the M4 Ultra can load and run AI models that previously required server-grade hardware. We ran Meta's Llama 4 70B model locally — something that was simply impossible on consumer hardware before this chip.
"The memory bandwidth is the real story here," said Anandtech's Andrei Frumusanu in a joint testing session. "Intel and AMD are still fighting over CPU cores. Apple has moved the battlefield entirely."
Real-World Impact
For creative professionals, the practical implications are immediate. Final Cut Pro renders a 4K HDR timeline with heavy color grading in real time with no dropped frames. Xcode builds a large Swift project in 18 seconds — a task that took 4 minutes on a 2022 Intel Mac Pro.
The chip will appear first in the new Mac Pro and Mac Studio, with pricing starting at $3,999 and $1,999 respectively. Given the performance on offer, both represent remarkable value for professional users.
Neural Engine: On-Device AI at Scale
The M4 Ultra's 32-core Neural Engine delivers 38 TOPS (tera-operations per second) — enough to run Apple Intelligence features entirely on-device, with no data leaving the machine. In practice, this means real-time transcription, translation, and image generation without cloud latency. For enterprise users with data privacy requirements, on-device AI processing is a significant advantage over cloud-dependent alternatives.
Memory Bandwidth: The Real Differentiator
The 800GB/s memory bandwidth is the specification that matters most for AI and creative workloads. For comparison, NVIDIA's H100 GPU — the current gold standard for AI training — has 3.35TB/s bandwidth, but costs $30,000 and requires a server rack. The M4 Ultra delivers a meaningful fraction of that bandwidth in a desktop machine that fits on a desk and costs $3,999.
Who Should Buy It
The M4 Ultra is not for everyone. If your workload is primarily web browsing, email, and office productivity, the M4 chip in a MacBook Air delivers 95% of the experience at a fraction of the price. The Ultra is for professionals whose work is genuinely compute-limited: video editors working in 8K, machine learning researchers training models locally, 3D artists rendering complex scenes, and software developers working on large codebases. For those users, the performance premium is justified many times over in time saved.
Thermal Design and Sustained Performance
One of the persistent criticisms of Apple Silicon in compact form factors has been thermal throttling — the chip slowing itself down under sustained load to prevent overheating. The Mac Pro and Mac Studio's larger chassis give the M4 Ultra room to breathe, and in our testing, sustained performance held within 3% of peak across a 90-minute 8K render. That's exceptional for a chip running at this performance level, and it's a direct result of Apple's decision to prioritise thermal headroom in the Mac Pro's chassis design.
The Mac Studio's thermal solution is more constrained, and we did observe slightly more throttling under extreme sustained loads — but even throttled, the M4 Ultra in the Mac Studio outperforms the M3 Ultra at peak. For most professional workloads, the Mac Studio is the better value proposition; the Mac Pro's additional thermal headroom only matters for the most extreme sustained compute tasks.
Connectivity and Expansion
The Mac Pro retains its PCIe expansion slots — a feature unique among Apple Silicon Macs and critical for professionals who need to add specialised hardware: high-end audio interfaces, video capture cards, or additional storage controllers. The M4 Ultra supports up to six Pro Display XDRs simultaneously, making it the only Mac capable of driving a truly professional multi-display video editing or colour grading suite.
Thunderbolt 5 ports deliver 120Gbps bandwidth — fast enough to saturate even the highest-end external NVMe arrays. The Mac Studio includes six Thunderbolt 5 ports and two USB-A ports; the Mac Pro adds PCIe slots for users who need even more expansion. Both machines include Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.3.
The Competition: Where Does It Stand?
The honest answer is that there is no direct competition for the M4 Ultra in its price range. AMD's Threadripper 7980X matches or exceeds it in raw multi-core CPU performance, but requires a separate GPU, consumes 350W under load, and costs significantly more when you factor in the platform. NVIDIA's workstation GPUs offer more raw GPU compute for AI training, but at 2–10× the price and with dramatically higher power consumption.
For the specific combination of CPU performance, GPU performance, memory bandwidth, power efficiency, and software ecosystem that most creative professionals need, the M4 Ultra has no peer. The question is not whether it is the best — it clearly is — but whether your workload justifies the price.