In a teardown of the new Mac Studio mini, we get our first look of just how enormous the new Apple M1 Ultra SoC really is. In a quick comparison, it's shown to be more than three times the size of AMD's standard desktop Ryzen CPUs.
It's perhaps no surprise this chip is so large, as it packs a lot inside. The M1 Ultra has two 10 core CPUs and a 32 core GPU, on the same die, alongside 128GB of memory. It totals over 114 billion transistors, and Apple claims it can compete with an RTX 3090 on GPU performance. That's not strictly true, and it won't be that great a gaming chip, but it is powerful, especially when it comes to 3D work and hardware accelerated video transcoding.
Fitting something this large inside a miniature chassis was a special feat of engineering in itself, too. The Mac Studio features a layered PCB with interlinks throughout, and a clever blower cooling solution which helps keep this monster chip from getting too toasty. That's hooked up to the enormous intergrated heatspreader on the M1 Ultra, covering up its twin M1 Max cores and all of the internal silicon that comes with that.
This miniature workstation is available now, with a starting price of $2,000, though you'll need to pay significantly more than that if you want the top performance and a decent amount of storage. That said, the teardown video above does seem to suggest that the NVMe SSDs may be upgradeable, so it might be you can buy a more affordable option and then upgrade the storage on your own for cheaper.
Source: Max Tech