Apple’s M6 chip brings two Neural Engines to its latest Macs, a hardware change the company says is aimed at improving on-device AI. The chip is now part of the 14-inch MacBook Pro and iMac, following its introduction in the Mac mini. In an Oct. 27 report, Popular Science’s Stan Horaczek describes the new hardware and a separate set of AI software updates.
The M6 has a 12-core CPU and 12-core GPU, two more cores in each than the base M5. Its bigger architectural shift is the Neural Engine: the M6 uses two 16-core Neural Engines, and Apple rates their combined performance at up to 1.9 times that of the single engine in M5. Each GPU core also includes a Neural Accelerator, which can take on AI work.
Those components reflect several routes to running AI tasks on a computer: dedicated Neural Engines, AI acceleration in the graphics hardware, and memory to keep data moving. Horaczek’s report notes that memory bandwidth reaches 170 gigabytes per second in M6 configurations with at least 24 gigabytes of memory. The 16-gigabyte configurations remain at 153 gigabytes per second, the same as M5. The report explains that bandwidth matters for local language models because their weights move through memory as they generate each token.
Apple’s performance comparisons are promising but should be read as company claims. Against an M5 MacBook Pro, Apple’s reported Blender, Xcode and Affinity tests, as well as time to first token for a local language model, were between 1.2 and 1.3 times faster. Apple also reports that the same Blender render ran up to 11.7 times faster than on a 13-inch MacBook Pro with M1. The Popular Science report relays those figures but does not provide independent benchmark results. Apple’s claim that M6 has the world’s fastest CPU core will likewise depend on real-world benchmarks to assess it.
The iMac announcement offers another company-reported measure of the AI push: Apple says M6 delivers up to five times faster on-device AI than the M4 iMac. It also claims up to twice the ray-tracing performance in games and SSD read and write speeds up to twice as fast. These are maximum comparisons from Apple, rather than results establishing that every task or configuration will see those gains.
Apple also announced AI features for its Creator Studio apps, separate from the M6 hardware. A beta assistant in Logic Pro is built on Apple’s own models and OpenAI’s, according to the report. It runs on Mac, requires an Apple Intelligence-capable computer with macOS 27, and is initially available in U.S. English. Another feature, Generate Fill in Pixelmator Pro, lets users select part of an image and describe a change for the software to make.
Together, the announcements show Apple placing AI processing both in its chips and in creative software. The hardware figures suggest where the company expects improvements, especially for local model use, but the report provides no independent testing to show how those gains translate across real applications. The assistant is also described as a beta with specific system and language requirements, so its reported capabilities are still limited in scope.