Apple’s M3 Ultra chip may be designed as its own, standalone chip, rather than being made of two M3 Max dies, according to a new theory.
Max Tech‘s Vadim Yuryev, outlined his thinking in a post on X on Thursday. Citing a post from @techanalye1 which suggests the M3 Max chip no longer features the UltraFusion interconnect, Yuryev theorized that the as-yet-unannounced and unreleased “M3 Ultra” chip will not be comprised of two Max chips in a single package. This means that the M3 Ultra is likely to be the first “Ultra” standalone chip.
Such a move would allow Apple to make specific customizations to the M3 Ultra to make it more suitable for intense workflows. This would allow Apple to make such moves as removing efficiency cores to make room for more performance cores, or adding additional GPU cores.
At the very least, a single M3 Ultra chip designed in the above way would almost certainly to offer better performance scaling than the M2 Ultra did compared to the M2 Max.
Yuryev also speculated that the M3 Ultra could feature its own UltraFusion interconnect, allowing two M3 Ultra dies to be combined in a single package to provide double the performance in an “M3 Extreme” chip.
Although Apple has not yet announced an M3 Ultra Chip, a January report suggested the new System on a Chip will be fabricated using TSMC’s N3E node, just like the A18 chip that is expected to be used in the iPhone 16 lineup later in the year.