Tech news in 3 minutes
OpenAI Jalapeno Custom AI ASIC at Hot Chips 2026
Apple M6 and M5 Ultra: Apple introduced the M6 chip in the new Mac mini and the M5 Ultra in the new Mac Studio, marking its first 2nm desktop processor and a quad-die design with up to 512GB of unified memory for high-capacity local AI and professional compute. The M6 features a 12-core CPU (2 super, 4 performance, 6 efficiency), a 12-core GPU with Neural Accelerators, and a dual 16-core Neural Engine delivering up to 2x peak compute. Unified memory tops at 32GB with 170GB/s bandwidth; Apple claims 1.2x faster multithreaded CPU performance than M5, nearly 30% more peak GPU AI compute, and 10% more memory bandwidth. The M5 Ultra uses Apple UltraFusion to combine two dual-die M5 Max chips into a quad-die SoC with inter-die fabric over 4.4TB/s. It scales to a 36-core CPU (12 super, 24 performance), an 80-core GPU, and a 32-core Neural Engine. Unified memory supports up to 512GB with 1.2TB/s bandwidth—50% higher than M3 Ultra—and a PCIe Gen6 SSD. Apple claims up to 1.3x faster multithreaded performance than M3 Ultra. Pricing: Mac Studio M5 Ultra 256GB starts over $11K; the 512GB model will be available in October. For comparison, the NVIDIA GB300 Station costs about $100K but offers higher memory bandwidth and total system memory, running models like Qwen3.6-35B-A3B NVFP4 at over 26K tokens/s. The M5 Ultra’s large memory pool and faster bandwidth position it as a strong local AI workstation for running large language models that discrete GPUs cannot fit.