Apple today unveiled the M6 as their first 2nm SoC design while also introducing the M5 Ultra as their first quad-die product.

The Apple M6 base model launched today for the new Mac Mini. The Apple M6 is their first TSMC 2nm chip and features a 12-core CPU, 12-core GPU, and dual 16-core neural engine. The M6 supports up to 170GB/s of unified memory bandwidth.

Twelve cores with the M6 is two more than the M5 and is a combination of two super cores, four performance cores, and six efficiency cores. The M6 is said to provide "the world's fastest single-threaded performance" and up to 1.2x the multi-threaded performance of the M5 or now up to 2.4x faster than the original M1.

The M5 Ultra debuted alongside the M6 with being their first quad-die architecture and most powerful Apple Silicon design ever for AI and professional workloads. The M5 Ultra supports up to 36 CPU cores, up to an 80 core GPU, and 1.2TB/s of unified memory bandwidth.

More details on the Apple M6 with the new Mac Mini along with the M5 Ultra debuting in the new Mac Studio can be found via the announcement this morning on [1]Apple.com .

With the launch of the M5 Ultra and M6, yet more work piles up for Asahi Linux and those bringing Apple Silicon support to Linux and the BSDs.With Linux 7.3 they are up to [2]very basic support for the M3 Pro / Max / Ultra for at least booting to a console but not yet any GPU acceleration or other features needed to daily use Apple M3 products on Linux.



[1] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/08/apple-introduces-m6-and-m5-ultra-for-a-big-leap-in-performance-and-ai-compute/

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/news/M3-Pro-Max-Ultra-Linux-7.3