Is there some tricky edge case here? I thought the “3” and “4” just denoted generations. The Ultra chips are like Apple’s equivalent of a workstation chip, they are always bigger right? It is like comparing the previous generation Xeon to a current gen i5.

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dwood_dev 4 days ago | parent [-]

Apple has been iterating IPC as well as increasing core count.

The Ultra is a pair of Max chips. While the core counts didn't increase from M3 to M4 Max, overall performance is in the neighborhood of 5-25% better. Which still puts the M3 Ultra as Apple's top end chip, and the M5 Max might not dethrone it either.

The uplift in IPC and core counts means that my M1 Max MBP has a similar amount of CPU performance as my M3 iPad Air.

	▲	bee_rider 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah, I thought that was it. I was confused because they describe it as “wacky,” haha. The Ultra chips are the result of scaling up a given generation. Of course, each generation has some single-core improvements and eventually that could catch up, but it can take a while to catch up to… twice as much silicon.