Initial MacBook Pro with M3 Max benchmarks have emerged online, and they’re incredibly impressive, to the point where they make the Mac Pro (2023) and its M2 Ultra chip look a little silly.
The brand new MacBook Pro with its range-topping M3 Max chip have hit Geekbench 6 (via MacRumors), the popular CPU benchmarking tool. The results are more or less on par with the M2 Ultra chip found in the Mac Pro, with both hitting around the 21,000 mark in multi-core terms.
“New chip as fast as old chip” might not sound like a particularly impressive claims, but let’s break this down a little.
The M2 Ultra is the ultimate iteration of Apple’s last-gen chip line. It was only released in June alongside the Mac Pro and Mac Studio, with the price of the former starting from £7,199, and the latter starting from £4,199.
That a laptop chip would come along and seemingly match it within a matter of months might have some early Mac Pro and Mac Studio adopters questioning their choices, and certainly questioning Apple’s.
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The M2 Ultra also packs a 24-core CPU, so it’s remarkable that the 16-core M3 Max is holding its own.
Of course there are some major caveats here. Geekbench 6 doesn’t cover anything like the full scope of a system’s performance, and it certainly doesn’t reflect real world performance. It’s quite possible that the M2 Ultra will absolute slay the M3 Ultra using other metrics and tests.
Still, this is a hugely impressive result for Apple’s new 3nm chip. It makes us wonder just how powerful the inevitable M3 Ultra is going to be.