With the recent MacBook Pro release, Apple introduced the M4, M4 Pro, and M4 Max chips, but there’s still one more chip in the series left: the M4 Ultra. A recent report gives us a little glimpse of what to expect from the top-of-the-line Mac chip.
In his recent Power On newsletter, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman makes a one-sentence mention that the Mac Pro will “probably” get a chip with a 32-core CPU and an 80-core GPU. Though he doesn’t specifically call it an M4 Ultra, the M4 series was just introduced, and past Ultra chips have double the CPU and GPU cores of the Max chip. The M4 Max in the MacBook Pro can be configured with a 16-core CPU and a 40-core GPU–double those specs, and you get numbers that match Gurman’s stated specs.
Since we know the M4 Max specs, we can take this M4 Ultra extrapolation one step further beyond what Gurman has reported. The M4 Max starts at 48GB of RAM, so if an Ultra chip is basically two Max chips, the M4 Ultra could start at 96GB of RAM. For reference, the current Mac Pro has an M2 Ultra chip with 24 CPU cores and 60 GPU cores and starts with 64GB of RAM.
Gurman also mentions that will bring “ray tracing to the Mac Pro,” and when you consider the optimizations and improvements Apple has made since the M2 Pro release, the M4 Ultra Mac Pro will be, as Gurman puts it, “one of the most powerful mainstream computer systems the market has ever seen.”
Gurman has previously reported that the Mac Pro will not arrive until late 2025 or at the earliest, WWDC 2025 in June. There’s a chance we could see the M4 Ultra before that, though, since the high-end Mac Studio uses an Ultra chip, and Gurman has previously reported that the Mac Studio could ship in the spring of 2025 or at WWDC.
Learn more about the upcoming M4 Mac Pro and M4 Mac Studio.
Author: Roman Loyola, Senior Editor, Macworld
Roman is a Macworld Senior Editor with over 30 years of experience covering the tech industry, focusing on the Mac and other products in the Apple ecosystem. He is also the host of the Macworld Podcast. His career started at MacUser, where he received Apple certification as a repair technician (when Apple did that kind of thing). He's also worked for MacAddict, MacLife, and TechTV.