Apple M6

The Apple M6 is the base system-on-chip (SoC) in the Apple Silicon family, built on the ARM64 architecture and the successor to the Apple M5. It was officially released in September 2026 and debuted in the Mac mini. It is the first Apple Silicon generation to launch with only a base variant (no Pro/Max versions at launch).

The chip integrates a 12-core CPU (2 super, 4 performance, 6 efficiency cores), a 12-core GPU with Neural Accelerators, a dual 16-core Neural Engine and a unified memory controller (16 GB in the base configuration, up to 32 GB) in a single package. Memory bandwidth is 153–170 GB/s depending on configuration. The Media Engine provides hardware acceleration for H.264, HEVC, ProRes and ProRes RAW, plus AV1 decode.

For AI, the unified memory and Neural Engine enable on-device inference of large language models (LLMs) — via Apple's MLX framework, Core ML and Metal, as well as tools such as LM Studio. Apple states up to 13.5× faster time to first token in LM Studio versus the M1, and up to 4.8× higher general performance versus the M4 (Apple internal testing).