Oh, it’s pretty smart. I haven’t seen anything like UltraFusion in any other PC designs and it is genius. Because you get the benefit of not increasing the die size in terms of low yields, but effectively having twice the dies size due to the interconnect.
And all the binning options are there. For Apple it’s a very smart architecture. They can iterate on this for years.
Isn’t it “better” to buy two M1 max studios than one M1 Ultra? The prices scales exactly 2 to 1.
I will be surprised how the studios are for archviz…(massive scenes)
To be honest i don’t think that the ultra will perform better than my 6year old 1080ti! Not in therms of viewport performance and not in renderperformance. If it does though then i‘m broke 
Oh it will. Massively.
Are you joking?!?
nope
just have an M1 here and my imagination is really good so 8x M1 Gpu wouldn’t allow me to render so fast like the 1080ti do…“waiting for the real benchmarks”
Someone over at Discord wrote:
Having used the mbp 16 with about that spec have proven to be extremely snappy and only be a little limited when rendering. The cpu is on a similar level as a 5800x and the gpu like a 1080ti in redshift. It’s enough to do stills but about half the perf of the 2080ti.
If this is correct, you’d need to spend well over $ 6.000 on an M1 Ultra Mac Studio configuration in order to match, but possibly not even surpass the performance of a three-year-old 2080 Ti Windows PC + 30 inch BenQ screen. A good deal of Apple love is necessary to justify that. 
No doubt Apple is thinking about how to match or beat CUDA and RT core technology. Maybe they can and maybe they will. They certainly have smoked the competition in dedicated video encode/decode.
As for where we sit right now Nvidia’s cards are way faster at 3d rendering than anything in the M1 family. The Nvidia 4000 family will crush everything, but the power required to run those cards…good gawd. What happens if the cost of electricity goes up 2x or 3x?
Studio display might be overkill. There’s monitors out there for less than 1k that would be good for design work. https://www.rtings.com/monitor/reviews/best/mac-mini
Edit: oh and 16gb ram makes things flow easier. My 8gb mini lags when I have too many apps or tabs open.
Why people keep saying that? the cards are not always at maximum and when they are their speed makes it more efficient.
This is the most recent rumour:
24GB is a good number, but you can go overboard with Megascans and the like. I am thinking here about Unreal.
one thing I saw mentioned in the keynote and repeated in several articles was that the M1 Ultra is considered the ‘final form’ of the M1 series. But then they also clearly said they have one more Mac to go, with the Mac Pro still to be announced.
So if there is a higher configuration yet to come, and M1 has been taken to its limit, does that mean the Mac pro will likely debut with an M2? I ponder only because if they’re looking for another big leap in performance (and price no doubt) on the Mac Pro relative to the Studio, it likely won’t just be slightly higher clocked cores or 1 or 2 extra GPU cores that were bandied about with the 13" Pro update rumors (which already seem to have been wrong).
I guess I’m just wondering, will the M2 have another large leap in performance overall to make for a substantially faster M2 Ultra (and hopefully also noticeably faster Pro and Max variants as well?)
It might be smart for them, but in the limited field of 3D rendering, I’m sorry, I don’t see it. Yet, at least, for what it is shown, and at this price.
As said, the thing I love is the 128 GB shared RAM concept, that is the really new thing, and it’s something useful right now.
I use the Mac Mini with 16 GB + Eizo 27" for web design/development since November 2020 and I never encountered any performance issues – in fact it is more than fast enough
I guess Apple is still not done with the intel Mac Pro
With Apple already making a push into our small 3D field with development help aimed at several of the CGI companies, I hope they continue that push on the tech side like they have over the decades for film.
For video you see Apple allocating a portion of their chips for video encoding and even going as far as making drop in cards (afterburner) dedicated purely for video.
I do hope and feel Apple will push the tech side of their products for 3D.
Sure for rendering, they don’t have RT cores. But the 64 core will render pretty well.
But Apple have created a very smart, very scalable architecture here. Production of a pretty large die, and hence low yield die is risky. But because they can bin M1 Max to be an M1 Pro if any of the lower part of the die is faulty and then to be able to connect two together to form an Ultra is genius.
It means that they still can use silicon even if there are faults (which is normal binning practice) but their range of options more than usual.
Also, as you mention the unified memory is another innovation that consoles have used before, but never done on this kind of scale.
A friend just told me that he’ll use his old iMac as a display for his soon-to-be-ordered Mac Studio. I hadn’t thought of that option for my wife’s Mac Mini acquisition plan, as she now works on a late-2013 iMac. Is it a viable display option, no strings attached?
Depending on what kind of work she does — more static than animated or video — grabbing one of the 27" iMacs as they get sunset might be a good deal.
Yes, an iMac released in 2013 can be used as a Thunderbolt display. You may need an adapter to convert the Thunderbolt cable.
Personally, I would go for a modern 3rd party 4K display with HDR. They aren’t that expensive.
