Apple's new M5 Ultra Mac Studio pushes up to 512GB of unified memory and 1.2TB/s of memory bandwidth.
The interesting part isn't the 512GB ceiling—M3 Ultra already supported that capacity.
The bigger change is bandwidth.
For developers running large local models, faster memory movement could improve prompt processing and inference throughput without requiring a larger model to fit in memory.
But there are still several unanswered questions:
How fast is prompt prefill on real workloads?
How does the $9,499 256GB configuration compare with GPU alternatives?
What will Apple's 512GB configuration cost?
Does Thunderbolt 5 clustering deliver the claimed scaling?
How does MLX compare with CUDA for serious AI/ML workloads?
Apple's hardware proposition is becoming clearer: large unified memory + high bandwidth + local inference.
But whether it's actually better value will depend on completed-task performance, not just memory capacity or theoretical AI compute.
Read the full analysis:
https://blog.invidelabs.com/m5-ultra-mac-studio-local-ai/
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