TL; DR
- Apple’s M6 chip, its first built on a 2nm process, debuts in the Mac mini starting at ₹99,900.
- M5 Ultra uses a new quad-die UltraFusion architecture, a first for Apple silicon.
- M6 offers a 12-core CPU and GPU with Neural Accelerators; M5 Ultra scales up to 512GB memory.
Apple’s M6, its first 2nm chip, debuts in the Mac mini starting at ₹99,900, while M5 Ultra introduces a first-of-its-kind quad-die architecture in the new Mac Studio.
Alongside the new Mac Mini and the Mac Studio, the Cupertino giant Apple has unveiled two new chips powering the impressively powerful AI computing devices: M6, which is the company’s first chip to be based on a 2nm fabrication process, and the M5 Ultra, which is the most powerful Apple silicon chip to have arrived to date.
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Apple’s M6 Chip Debuts On New Mac Mini
The new Mac mini starts at ₹99,900 with the M6 chip. Meanwhile, the higher-end M5 Pro configuration begins at ₹2,09,900. That’s a difference of ₹1,10,000 between the two configurations, which may make buyers considering the more powerful option think twice.
Both the Mac mini versions are available for pre-order now. Deliveries start September 22 alongside the rest of Apple’s refreshed desktop lineup. And if you don’t already know it, that’s a couple of days after the new iPhone 18 Pro models are expected to ship (from September 18, 2026).
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Addressing the elephant in the room, the new M6 chip packs a 12-core CPU, two more cores than its M5 predecessor. The CPU cores are split into 2 super cores, 4 performance cores, and 6 efficiency cores. Alongside it’s a 12-core GPU, with every core now carrying its own Neural Accelerator, similar to how the Pro-tier iPhone series chips do.
With the CPU and GPU improvements, the M6 chip claims up to 1.2x faster multithreaded performance and nearly 30% more peak AI compute on the GPU side (compared to the M5 chip). Further, the unified memory bandwidth has climbed to 170GB/s (up from 153.6 GB/s). Then there’s the new dual 16-core Neural Engine, which doubles peak on-device AI throughput compared to the outgoing version.
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M5 Ultra Is The New Apple Powerhouse
Besides the baseline M6 chip that could power a new iPad Pro version this year and a MacBook Air next year, Apple has also unveiled the M5 Ultra chip. It fuses two dual-die M5 Max chips into a quad-die architecture for the first time in any Apple silicon. The company calls it UltraFusion, and the technology pushes inter-die bandwidth past 4.4TB/s. The result is an 80-core GPU and up to a 36-core CPU behaving as a single unified processor.
The M5 Ultra is available with the Mac Studio, starting from ₹6,29,900 in India, with Education Store pricing dropping the entry-point to ₹5,84,900.
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| Spec | M6 | M5 Ultra |
| Process Node | 2nm (Apple’s first) | Built from two M5 Max dies (quad-die) |
| CPU Cores | 12 (2 super + 4 performance + 6 efficiency) | Up to 36 |
| GPU Cores | 12, with Neural Accelerators | Up to 80, with Neural Accelerators |
| Neural Engine | Dual 16-core | 32-core |
| Unified Memory | Up to 32GB | Up to 512GB |
| Memory Bandwidth | 170GB/s | 1.2TB/s |
| Debuts In | Mac mini | Mac Studio |
| Starting Price (India) | ₹99,900 | Part of ₹6,29,900 Mac Studio config |
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