In an uncharacteristic August launch, Apple has updated the Mac mini, retaining the same design, but adding the M6 processor.
The release comes almost two years after the then-redesigned M4 Mac mini was released. There's nothing different externally, with the major change being the M6 processor.
And, it comes after wait times were as long as two months on the morning of August 25 for the M4 version of the hardware. It will almost certainly sell out rapidly upon release, and we advise that if you want one, you order one when the preorder period starts.
"Today, we're debuting the next giant leap in performance and AI compute for Apple silicon with the incredibly advanced M6 and the most powerful M-series chip yet, M5 Ultra," said Sri Santhanam, Apple's vice president of Silicon Engineering Group. "Built using the cutting-edge 2 nm process, M6 combines a new CPU complex, two additional CPU and GPU cores, a Dual 16-core Neural Engine, and more unified memory bandwidth to power through workloads with amazing energy efficiency. And for the ultimate desktop performance and the ability to run massive AI models, M5 Ultra features a massive GPU, now with Neural Accelerators, and more unified memory bandwidth, pushing the boundaries of what a desktop can do."
M6 has a 12-core CPU with two super cores, four performance cores, and six efficiency cores. Apple says the combo delivers up to 1.2x faster multithreaded performance as compared to M5, and up to 2.4x faster than M1.
Also, the M6 features a 12-core GPU each with an accompanying Neural Accelerator. Apple also says that this delivers a nearly 30 percent increase in peak GPU compute for AI compared to M5, and more than eight times faster compared to M1.
The new M6 chip supports up to 32GB of unified memory. That RAM also provides up to 170GB/s of unified memory bandwidth.
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