Apple’s new M6 chip gets more cores and more AI compute
The Verge Jay Peters ● Covered by 7 sources
Apple unveiled an M6 Mac chip and a bigger M5 Ultra. The M6 is its first 2nm chip, with more CPU cores and more AI hardware.
Based on reporting by The Verge, Jay Peters — read the original for the full story.
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Apple has unveiled the M6, a new Mac chip that it says is built on 2nm process technology. That makes it the company’s first chip on that node, and Apple is promising better performance and better power efficiency from the switch.
The M6 also pushes harder on on-device AI. Apple says it includes a Dual 16-core Neural Engine for AI workloads, which is the kind of hardware shift that matters when the company wants more work done locally instead of in the cloud.
Core counts are up too. The M6 has a 12-core CPU, compared with 10 cores in the M5. Apple says that breaks down into two super cores, four performance cores, and six efficiency cores.
Alongside it, Apple introduced the M5 Ultra and called it its most powerful chip ever. The company says it is aimed at heavy jobs like 3D rendering and running frontier AI models. That is a very Apple way of saying this one is for the people who never stop opening bigger files.
There’s a lot packed into these launches, but the message is simple: Apple wants the Mac to look stronger both as a workstation and as an AI machine. The M6 is the more interesting signal because it ties that pitch to a first-in-line 2nm chip, not just a routine bump.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
Apple still loves the classic trick: wrap a lot of silicon ambition in a clean product story and let everyone else chase the benchmark charts. The real tell here is the Neural Engine push, because the company clearly wants on-device AI to feel like a native Mac feature, not a cloud dependency. That’s the right direction, and also the least surprising one if you’ve been watching where the industry is headed.
Read more about this at: The Verge
