Apple’s M4 Max Is The First Non-Ultra Chipset To Have a Memory Bandwidth That Exceeds 500GB/s, Features Double The Throughput Compared To The M4 Pro

The M4 trio was completed yesterday after Apple officially announced the M4 Max, which can be configured with up to a 16-core CPU and a 40-core GPU. Of course, for those that require an abnormal amount of memory for running Large Language Models, the new chipset can also be configured with up to 128GB of unified RAM, which Apple claims has a bandwidth of 546GB/s. This is an incredible feat because it is the first time that a non-Ultra variant of the company’s custom chipset lineup has crossed half a terabyte of memory bandwidth.

The M1 Ultra and M2 Ultra continue to be faster than the M4 Max in memory bandwidth, as both Apple Silicon can touch 800GB/s

Just yesterday, it was revealed that the M4 Pro became the fastest chipset that Apple has ever launched, as it not only beat the M3 Max from last year, but also the M2 Ultra. Sadly, its victory will be short-lived because the M4 Max will likely overtake its slower brother in both multi-core performance and memory bandwidth.

Comparing both chipsets side-by-side, we found that the M4 Pro has a maximum memory throughput of 273GB/s, but what makes the M4 Max even more remarkable in this regard is that it flaunts twice that bandwidth at 546GB/s. One reason why this might be possible is that the M4 Pro is limited to 64GB of unified RAM, whereas the M4 Max can support up to 128GB.

However, we also want to point out that the M1 Ultra supports up to 128GB RAM and it features a memory bandwidth of up to 800GB/s, but that is likely thanks to the UltraFusion process that Apple employs in combining two M1 Max chipsets together to form a single unit.

As you would have guessed, the M2 Ultra can be configured with up to 192GB unified RAM, but its memory bandwidth is capped at 800GB/s, so it is likely a limitation placed by Apple rather than increasing the RAM count to increase that number. Then again, it also costs a massive premium to upgrade from the M4 Pro to the M4 Max to get that memory bandwidth, so that is one thing to keep in mind.