Apple is building the M7 Ultra to support up to 1.5TB of unified memory, finally matching the ceiling of the 2019 Intel Mac Pro, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reported in Sunday's Power On newsletter. But the chip's real purpose extends beyond a specs milestone: Apple sees it as the foundation of its AI server strategy, with performance that Gurman says approaches Nvidia's Blackwell accelerators.
The M7 Ultra will roughly double the 768GB memory cap planned for the M5 Ultra arriving later this year. Whether Apple ships a 1.5TB configuration depends on the ongoing memory-chip shortage, which has driven up component costs and made high-capacity DRAM harder to source, Gurman noted.
Apple's chip roadmap has been reshuffled to prioritize AI performance. The company is skipping the Pro, Max, and Ultra variants of the upcoming M6 entirely, instead rushing the M7 generation to market roughly six months after the base M6 debuts this fall. The M7 base chip arrives in the first half of 2027, followed by the M7 Pro and M7 Max at the end of 2027, with the M7 Ultra expected in 2028.
The Neural Engine, born from Apple's abandoned self-driving car project, is getting major upgrades in the M7 line. The Verge reported that early work on the car's processor led to the Neural Engine's debut in the A11 Bionic and iPhone X, and Apple is now doubling down on that architecture for its AI push.
Memory bandwidth jumps to roughly 240 GB/s in the base M7, up from 200 GB/s in the M6, according to AppleInsider. The M7 Ultra's massive unified memory pool positions it as a server-grade AI chip, with engineers reportedly working on an M7 Ultra-based server product that could arrive by 2029.
Based on Apple's current RAM pricing of roughly $25 per additional gigabyte, upgrading a Mac from 128GB to 1.5TB would cost over $35,000. Apple earlier this year discontinued the 512GB and 256GB configurations of the M3 Ultra Mac Studio, leaving 96GB as the sole option for that machine. The M7 Ultra's 1.5TB support closes a gap that has frustrated professionals since Apple Silicon debuted.
Unified memory, soldered onto the processor die for speed, capped Apple's highest-end machines well below what the 2019 Mac Pro offered with traditional DIMM slots. That limitation ends with the M7 generation.
