Apple M3 Ultra benchmark shows marginal gains over M4 Max

Apple announced its new Mac Studio desktop earlier this week with the M4 Max and all-new M3 Ultra chips. A version of the new Mac Studio with the M3 Ultra has now appeared in a Geekbench 6 listing, giving us our first glimpse at Apple’s top-tier M-series chip.

The M3 Ultra Mac Studio (Mac15,14) in the listing features the 32-core CPU of the chip and is armed with 256GB of unified memory. It managed a 3,221 single-core score and a 27,749 multi-core score.

Mac Studio M3 Ultra Geekbench scorecard

These results show that the M3 Ultra is actually 20% slower in the single-core test compared to a MacBook Pro 16 with the M4 Max chip (16-core CPU). The multi-core scores show an 8% advantage for the M3 Ultra.

When comparing the M3 Ultra Mac Studio against its M2 Ultra-equipped predecessor, we see 13% gains in single-core scores and a 25% jump in the multi-core department. That's less than the advertised 50% CPU performance gains seen in Apple's marketing materials.

It should be noted that these are still early benchmarks targeting CPU performance, so we’ll have to wait for more official tests and other more GPU-intensive benchmarks where the M3 Ultra should show its might. We should also note that the M3 Ultra uses TSMC’s first-generation 3nm process while the M4-series gets the more efficient second-gen design.

Source