According to the latest Power On newsletter from Mark Gurman, Apple is preparing to include up to 1.5TB of RAM in the upcoming M7 Ultra chip. This’ll mean Apple Silicon will finally match the highest RAM configuration available on the highest end 2019 Intel Mac Pro.
The amount of RAM available in Apple Silicon Macs has always been a limitation, largely because Apple solders the RAM onto the same die as the processor – allowing for immensely high transfer speeds. This is what makes unified memory possible. Of course, it also means the amount of RAM is limited to how big the chipset is.
However, according to Mark Gurman, it sounds like Apple is finally preparing to close that gap. The company is preparing a configuration of the M7 Ultra chipset with 1.5TB of RAM:
The new Ultra is designed to support as much as 1.5 terabytes of memory — roughly double the capacity planned for the M5 Ultra — though whether Apple ultimately offers that configuration will depend on the state of the industry. Widespread memory-chip shortages have made the component harder to find and more expensive.
He does note that it might not end up launching with 1.5TB of RAM because of the ongoing memory shortage. Nonetheless, Apple is engineering the M7 Ultra to support it.
Earlier this year, Apple discontinued the 512GB configuration of the M3 Ultra Mac Studio. It then followed by discontinuing the 256GB configuration – leaving 96GB as the sole choice for the highest end Mac Studio. If you bought M4 Max instead, you could configure up to 128GB.
Top comment by Kwyjibo
Based on Apple’s current RAM pricing (roughly $25 per additional gigabyte), upgrading to 1.5TB of RAM from a base configuration of 128GB will likely cost over $35,000.
You can't extrapolate linearly. You can't shove 12x the RAM chips in the same box, it won't fit, you have signal integrity problems, a bus can only take so many die/packages. You have to use bigger RAM chips and the bigger the chip, the cost goes up exponentially with area/capacity. This is because the wafer has some random distribution of defects and you have to be lucky enough to get a whole chip that's defect free.
For comparison, Dell is charging $165,000 for 1.5 TB on the Precision 7960, and that's conventional DDR5. Lenovo is charging $407,000 for 1.5 TB on the Thinkstation PX. Absolutely no way that Apple is charging a fraction of this.
Apple will also be debuting a new M5 Ultra chip later this year with up to 768GB of unified memory, a new record for Apple silicon.
Based on Apple’s current RAM pricing (roughly $25 per additional gigabyte), upgrading to 1.5TB of RAM from a base configuration of 128GB will likely cost over $35,000.
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