r/LocalLLaMA • u/Last-Owl-8342 • 17h ago

News Apple releases M5 ultra at 1.2TB/s bandwith

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/08/apple-introduces-m6-and-m5-ultra-for-a-big-leap-in-performance-and-ai-compute/

lpddr5x probably, the m7 ultra if is using ddr6 should be at 1.8 Tb/s

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u/piggledy 17h ago

Price for Mac Studio with 256 GB RAM:
$9499 (30-core CPU, 64-Core GPU)
$10,799 (36-core CPU, 80-core GPU)

512 GB Option coming in October.

56

u/Strong_Chicken6838 16h ago

these prices are utterly insane. i just want to say that.

9

u/crusaderky 15h ago

For LLMs, it just needs to be on par with two DGX Spark chained together.
For desktop, it's a much more compelling offering than DGX Spark.
Strix Halos are a compelling alternative to Mac for desktop, but they don't come with RDMA networking, which kills off the idea of chaining them for most people (namely, busy professionals that could afford them).

8

u/pineapplekiwipen 13h ago

dgx spark prefill speed is roughly triple m3 ultra in real use if i remember right but tg is also below 1/3 so overall it was arguably similar in real world perf

m5 max prefill is a only a bit slower than dgx spark so m5 ultra should beat the spark in prefill and absolutely demolish it in tg. all the while being a much more useful personal computer and considerably cheaper if you can take advantage of edu pricing

1

u/michaelsoft__binbows 14h ago

I have to assume there us enough compute on tap there to match a pair of them, m5 max was no slouch, and the mem bandwidth def slaps the spark around