Apple have announced new Mac mini and Mac Studio machines.
Mac mini has either M5 Pro chip or M6 chip
M5 Pro
- 15‑core CPU with 5 super cores and 10 performance cores, 16‑core GPU with Neural Accelerators, 16‑core Neural Engine, 307GB/s memory bandwidth
Configurable up to 64GB unified memory - 18‑core CPU with 6 super cores and 12 performance cores, 20‑core GPU with Neural Accelerators, 16‑core Neural Engine, 307GB/s memory bandwidth
Configurable up to 64GB unified memory
M6
- 12‑core CPU with 2 super cores, 4 performance cores and 6 efficiency cores, 12‑core GPU with Neural Accelerators, Dual 16‑core Neural Engine, up to 170GB/s memory bandwidth
Configurable up to 32GB unified memory
Mac Studio
Mac Studio has either M5 max or M5 Ultra chips
M5 max
- 18‑core CPU with 6 super cores and 12 performance cores, 32‑core GPU with Neural Accelerators, 16‑core Neural Engine, 460GB/s memory bandwidth
36GB unified memory - 18‑core CPU with 6 super cores and 12 performance cores, 40‑core GPU with Neural Accelerators, 16‑core Neural Engine, 614GB/s memory bandwidth
Configurable up to 128GB unified memory
M5 Ultra
- 30‑core CPU with 10 super cores and 20 performance cores, 64‑core GPU with Neural Accelerators, 32‑core Neural Engine, 1.2TB/s memory bandwidth
Configurable up to 256GB unified memory - 36‑core CPU with 12 super cores and 24 performance cores, 80‑core GPU with Neural Accelerators, 32‑core Neural Engine, 1.2TB/s memory bandwidth
Configurable up to 512GB unified memory
All come with a variety of storage options.
I usually go to Arstechnica for a review
The devices’ popularity for production inference took off after macOS 26.2 shipped last December. According to Apple’s release notes, 26.2 enabled “low-latency communication between Thunderbolt 5 hosts for use cases including distributed AI inference using MLX.” Thunderbolt 5 is a very fast wired data connection, and MLX is an open source array framework designed to help machine learning workflows take full advantage of the M-series chips’ unified memory.