14 comments

  • GeekyBear 3 hours ago
    There are also leaks for the M5 Ultra & Base M6.

    M5 Ultra CPU:

    https://browser.geekbench.com/search?k=parkdale_cpu&q=mac17%...

    M5 Ultra GPU:

    https://browser.geekbench.com/search?k=grand_gpu&q=mac17%2C1...

    Base M6 CPU:

    https://browser.geekbench.com/search?k=parkdale_cpu&q=mac18%...

    Base M6 GPU:

    https://browser.geekbench.com/search?k=grand_gpu&q=mac18%2C5

    The Base M6 CPU single core is averaging a bit over 4000 on Geekbench 7.

    For comparison, the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 averages 3161 on the same test.

    https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/amd-ryzen-9-9950x3d...

    The Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus averages 2940 on the same test.

    https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/intel-core-ultra-7-...

    • esperent 1 hour ago
      There's also the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme, 3,438 points in single-core and 27,519 points in multi-core, which I think was the record when it was released a year ago.

      I guess they'll release an X3 in six months. So it's interesting to see the race is now between Apple and Qualcomm, both on Arm, with Intel and AMD getting left behind, at least on this benchmark.

      https://signal65.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Signal65-Ins...

    • revolvingthrow 2 hours ago
      I don’t understand those benchmarks.

      According to geekbench 7800x3d is 2400 single core, 15500 multicore. M4 pro is 3350 single core and 24750 multicore. Yet when I convert video using libsvtav1 with ffmpeg I’m getting noticeably faster performance on the desktop. And that’s with mbp, which doesn’t thermally throttle within 15 seconds.

      Is it the 96mb cache? Avx-512? Are benchmarks bullshit when comparing different architectures?

      • ksec 5 minutes ago
        Just want to add apart from all the other comments. SVT was brought by Intel and spent years to make it extremely well tuned for x86. While not the same for ARM and not even for Apple.

        Another point is that the multicore part uses all core including E-Core. On AMD the multicore are all the same. Meaning for some benchmarks this will flavour Apple more.

        Again there is nothing that stop people from optimising it for ARM Mac. The problem is the usage of it is so small it probably doesn't make sense to focus on it. SVT took a really long time for it to reach quality parity with AOM's AV1 encoder and later exceed it.

      • GeekyBear 1 hour ago
        Remember all those years when people claimed Apple chips were "cheating" on benchmarks because they had crypto instructions that x86 lacked?

        Apple chips don't have AVX-512.

        They do have media engines (that don't support AV1 encode), so if you switch to H.265, it will pull way ahead.

        • ajross 1 hour ago
          > Apple chips don't have AVX-512.

          Zen 4 isn't 512 bits wide though, it's a split cycle 256 bit wide SIMD engine otherwise very similar (except in register size) to M6's.

          The answer is more that Geekbench is at this point[1] heavily tuned to exactly the code Apple silicon does well: implicitly parallel wide-issue scalar code that you typically get out of modern compilers and JIT engines when throwing mostly-unoptimized "regular source code" at them. Apple has an enormous amount of instruction issue parallelism compared with x86.

          The grandparent is looking at transcoding tasks where the limit isn't instruction issue but actual compute hardware on the core. And Apple doesn't actually win by much there.

          It's just hard to know what to measure. Geekbench tends to be a metric for "feels fast doing boring interactive user stuff", which probably matches Apple's marketing imperatives well.

          [1] Really they keep moving harder in that direction with every release. The "cooling pauses" in v6 likewise seemed very much like an attempt to boost the score on fanless Apple devices. If one were the type to allege a dark conspiracy, this is a tempting spot.

      • tom_ 44 minutes ago
        Judging by my PCs (M4 Max Mac Studio; 2990WX desktop PC), Geekbench might flatter the Apple chips for multicore a bit I think:

        Geekbench 7 results:

        * AMD 2990WX: 1384 (single), 13052 (multi) (https://browser.geekbench.com/v7/cpu/181239)

        * Apple M4 Max: 3552 (single), 29863 (multi) (https://browser.geekbench.com/v7/cpu/390256)

        For parallelisable stuff that can occupy all cores for an extended period, the 2990WX typically takes about ~1.2x as long to do the same work/does ~0.83x the work per unit time, assuming code compiled with clang or gcc. Which isn't really coming across in the numbers here.

        CPUMark is a bit better:

        * AMD 2990WX: 2282 (single), 32040 (multi) (https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+Ryzen+Threadrip...)

        * Apple M4 Max: 4590 (single), 43911 (multi) (https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Apple+M4+Max+16+Cor...)

        I haven't spent much time timing single core stuff, except - regarding clang, which looks like it contributes to the Geekbench 7 score, I did some measurements a few months ago suggesting that clang compiles for x64 more slowly than for ARM, all else being as equal as I could be bothered to try to make it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46938682 - and the single threaded test runs I did of my code suggest that the Geekbench 7 single core might be about right?

        (Whether the clang timing discrepancy is actually relevant to Geekbench, I've no idea, but I thought it interesting anyway.)

        If you need a benchmark that makes the PC look massively faster than the Mac, I'm sure those are available too.

      • snek_case 1 hour ago
        Probably AVX-512. AFAIK Apple CPUs are still using ARM NEON instructions with 128-wide SIMD registers. I guess they are banking on you using the GPU if you want to parallelize those kinds of workload.
      • galad87 1 hour ago
        Which version of svt-av1 are you using? Neon optimisations were added quite recently in svt-av1, and are still a bit incomplete, so it might make a difference.
      • BoingBoomTschak 1 hour ago
        I think software with a strong focus on SIMD really favours x86 over Apple, since AVX2 support was pretty uniform and AVX-512 (except Intel's fiasco) has been supported for a while, while the post-NEON landscape is strange in ARM country.

        From what I've been able to gather, Apple only supports SME and the small "streaming" part of SVE2 required by SME since the M4. Which seems to be mostly useless for video encoding (I only see NEON/SVE in https://gitlab.com/AOMediaCodec/SVT-AV1/-/tree/master/Source... or https://github.com/Multicorewareinc/x265/tree/master/source/...) it's basically a GEMM engine.

        So basically, video encoding is a bad show for Apple who seem to be saying "use crappy hardware encoding and buy amd64 if you need more".

        Very hard to find benchmark data. Found https://openbenchmarking.org/vs/Processor/Apple+M4+Pro,AMD+R... that shows a good x265 performance at 1080p but not 4K. Guess the wider SIMD units matter more there.

        • GeekyBear 1 hour ago
          > So basically, video encoding is bad show for Apple

          Apple has dedicated hardware for video decode and encode for several video formats.

          That's why the comparisons between PCs and Macs running video editing software favor the Macs so heavily.

          • BoingBoomTschak 1 hour ago
            HW and SW encoding are not comparable with regard to quality (for the same size, obviously) though. That's kinda what I meant with my quip.
            • GeekyBear 51 minutes ago
              Nothing prevents a vendor from implementing a high quality hardware encoder, just as nothing prevents the creation of a low quality software encoder.

              Video editing is an area that Apple dominates because PCs become a laggy mess on complicated high resolution edits.

              AMD has started to copy the same strategy with the recent Ryzen AI chips. They include hardware video encode/decode units as well as unified memory.

        • api 51 minutes ago
          X64 does have a stronger SIMD story, but this is partly compensated for by the fact that ARM64 is much easier to decode wide. M series has a very wide decoder and a lot of instruction level parallelism. It can turn chunks of those 128-bit SIMD operations into what amounts to wider operations.

          AVX still wins though.

          M series still wins on performance per watt and now apparently leads on general purpose code.

          All these leading edge chips are very good. We have an embarrassment of riches when it comes to blistering fast chips here.

      • luxuryballs 1 hour ago
        sounds like it's the software
      • kakacik 2 hours ago
        > Are benchmarks bullshit when comparing different architectures?

        Bingo, each CPU is too unique with its own strengths and weaknesses to make broad statements, marketing picks up what they like and ignore rest

  • gainsurier 47 minutes ago
    Sorry everyone, this submission appears to be forged—the L1 and L2 caches don't match up m4 pro and m5 pro
  • galad87 4 hours ago
    Cool, but Apple didn't announce any M6 Pro yet, so where is this coming from?
    • mdp2021 4 hours ago
      Probably internal tests?

      The software identifies the hardware, performs the benchmarks, and sends the heading and results to the Geekbench DB. Somebody who had the machine at hand must have run it.

    • fartfeatures 4 hours ago
      I thought they were skipping the M6 pro chips (or is that just the max and ultra?) to accelerate AI focused M7.
      • GeekyBear 3 hours ago
        The word was that they weren't going to ship systems with the M6 Pro, Max or Ultra.

        The M7 generation has updated the tensor instructions in the GPU cores and they want to ship that ASAP.

        • CerebralCoding 2 hours ago
          I haven’t heard about the updated tensor instructions before - got any sources?
      • reitzensteinm 3 hours ago
        If they’re rushing the M7, it’s possible the M6 Pro and Max will be MacBook Ultra only. It would certainly give it quite a halo.
      • SXX 3 hours ago
        This was just rumors like 99% of other Apple-related news.
        • rbanffy 2 hours ago
          Speaking of rumours, Apple is reportedly developing a server box with multiple top of the line chips.

          I would love to see macOS replacing Windows in virtual desktop environments.

    • tristanj 4 hours ago
      Internal leaks, these happen frequently. Employees have access to these devices for months prior to launch. Someone ran a benchmark and uploaded it on a machine they weren't supposed to.
      • gizajob 3 hours ago
        I find that hard to believe at Apple. Not even possible that it’s accidental. They have their own internal tools, all packets leaving the network will be interrogated, leaking data is a sackable offence… if it’s in the geekbench database then it’s there because they put it there.
        • swiftcoder 3 hours ago
          > Not even possible that it’s accidental. They have their own internal tools, all packets leaving the network will be interrogated, leaking data is a sackable offence

          This is a story that folks like to tell, but it's not really how things work - at least since they stopped letting Steve Jobs lock all his engineers in the conference venue.

          Leaks are a sackable offence at every tech firm, deep packet inspection firewalls are used all over the place, information leaks like this still happen pretty much every single product cycle.

          • VerifiedReports 3 hours ago
            People love to tell stories about how stuff is done at Apple, which are often utter bullshit.

            Not to mention that Apple has a huge number of teams, and no absolute standards across them. People would be shocked at the things Apple DOESN'T do.

            Then again, with the current state of their QA, I think it's becoming clear what Apple doesn't do much of anymore.

        • aenis 2 hours ago
          The details of the Apple vs. OpenAI dispute over leaked data show their security is not quite that tight.
        • dainiusse 3 hours ago
          +1 . The only case it is allowed is Apple's own marketing team.
        • discordance 2 hours ago
          It’s happened in the past. Like that employee who left the unreleased iPhone in a bar by accident.
        • mathisfun123 1 hour ago
          > I find that hard to believe at Apple

          Where does the myth of Apple come from? You should go on blind and ask someone that works there the reality lolol

          • gizajob 42 minutes ago
            You think they need geekbench to verify how fast their chips run?
    • shim__ 4 hours ago
      How does Geekbench even verify what CPU I'm using? Couldnt you inject forged data and add a even faster M100?
  • asimovDev 3 hours ago
    • konaraddi 1 hour ago
      Woah the A19 Pro is 5th, that’s bonkers! It’s used in an iPhone and its power consumption is lower than chips intended for desktops.
      • ksec 4 minutes ago
        A20 Pro would have been number 1 if it was included in that chart.
    • louwrentius 2 hours ago
      It's insane to me that the fastest Mac chip is almost a fifth faster than the fastest Intel chip for a fraction of the power budget.
      • Footprint0521 1 hour ago
        The moment AAA gaming becomes possible on macOS, the floodgates open and windows is dead
        • eahm 1 hour ago
          Not going to happen, Linux already won, doesn’t look like it but you’ll see.

          Linux is actually exciting contrary to Apple as a company, their hardware, their prices and macOS in general.

          And I’m saying this as a Windows user too, I will NEVER buy a Mac but I’ve used Linux on and off for 30+ years.

          For the past 5-10 years Linux has been the only excitement I’ve had personally.

          • brabel 1 hour ago
            Why will you never buy a Mac even if they are making the best hardware available? Money or ideology?
            • eahm 1 hour ago
              I think it's neither, it all comes down to peace of mind and that's the true future of technology.

              In the past it was more of a race of companies trying to get "there" first, not anymore, we live in an interesting age where people feel constantly controlled and everyone is exhausted about tech in general.

              Linux gives you that middle finger peace of mind like saying "I will never be controlled anymore and ever again" ..funny there is a big Warez article on the HN homepage at the same time of this discussion, that's exactly what it feels like to finally come out on the other side legally.

              People took decades to finally being liberated from Windows and Microsoft and many like me will never be controlled that way again and while I respect Apple more than Microsoft for a lot of things in the end it's just another corporation that wants to greedily take your life energy and precious time and enslave you again.

              They are creating the best hardware at the worst possible time, but it's good for competition so it's all good.

              • nick_ 1 hour ago
                I'll gladly sell my soul first thing every morning in exchange for a laptop that lasts longer than two hours on battery, wifi/audio/webcam work after waking from sleep, and don't need to learn a complexity fractal of CLI commands to do basic things with my computer.
                • astralkraft 48 minutes ago
                  They are called Chromebooks. It can sometimes be difficult for some people to find that toggle switch that enables Debian, but I can assure you, no arcane CLI commands are involved.

                  EDIT: Any Chromebook using a Panther Lake chip, or an upcoming Googlebook ARM, can get you there.

                • eahm 56 minutes ago
                  [dead]
            • nchmy 1 hour ago
              Money AND ideology - I've never owned any apple product, and never will
            • pacifika 1 hour ago
              Lock-in: ownership over user choice and data
            • realusername 1 hour ago
              Personally it's the software which doesn't make me buy one. The hardware really is one of the best you can buy but using the software makes me lose my hair.
          • apexalpha 1 hour ago
            Linux sits at <3% users or so.
            • astralkraft 1 hour ago
              Not even Microsoft believes that. Where could you possibly find a misrepresentation like that?

              https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide...

              ~10% is a good guess. AI tools run much better on Ubuntu/Fedora out of the box, and that is not exactly a secret either.

              • diab0lic 12 minutes ago
                > Where could you possibly find a misrepresentation like that?

                On the stats website you linked at any time in the last 20 years with the exception of the two most recent months. To be explicit all of the data points are closer to 3% than 10% except July and August 2026.

                I don’t think it’s that surprising that the GP has a misrepresentation of Linux desktop deployments given that the uptick is recent.

                • astralkraft 6 minutes ago
                  AI tools are the killer app driving Desktop Linux. Is anyone else still confused about this? It's been a few minutes since 2023.
                  • diab0lic 5 minutes ago
                    This doesn’t address or even acknowledge a single thing I said.
            • eahm 1 hour ago
              Linux has been at 100% for years, don't get confused about mouse and keyboard.
        • izacus 1 hour ago
          Wonder what will be first, the year of Linux desktop or the year of Apple AAA gaming ;P

          Been hearing both for the same time.

        • fg137 1 hour ago
          AAA games already exist on Mac, and actually quite a few of them.

          And Windows is not remotely dead yet. Gamers are not selling their PCs and getting Macs.

  • a3w 3 hours ago
    >4k? Thought not would barely twice that of an 15 year old CPU, but it of course is geekbench 7, not 6 or 5!

    So this is different and faster than such a result in the old scoring would have implied.

    • GeekyBear 2 hours ago
      For context, Intel has yet to ship a core that scores over 3000 on the same test.

      AMD beats Intel, but only by a couple hundred points.

      Qualcomm beats them both.

    • fsh 3 hours ago
      It is not quite twice the score of a 6 year old Apple M1 though. And this is with much higher clock speeds (4.8 GHz vs. 3.2 GHz).
      • alasano 2 hours ago
        Shame, I only upgrade my M1 for chips that are at least twice as fast.

        It feels like a crime upgrading from this thing tbh.

        • rbanffy 2 hours ago
          Recently I have upgraded for memory capacity.
          • alasano 1 hour ago
            Jokes aside yeah I'm definitely in need of a ram upgrade. Or I have to learn how to close Firefox tabs.

            But with a few docker containers, android studio running an emulator + vscode and a ton of Claude code / Pi / Codex instances, I'm basically maxed out all the time now.

            • alpaca128 1 hour ago
              "Or I have to learn how to close Firefox tabs"

              I use about:processes to stop processes that eat up too much memory over time. The tabs stay open but get unloaded. YouTube especially acts like a black hole for memory if you let it.

      • GeekyBear 1 hour ago
        The M1 is about 1700 on Geekbench 7 single core.
  • rbanffy 2 hours ago
    Has anyone tried to run Geekbench on POWER11 or a Telum II?
    • speed_spread 41 minutes ago
      Ah, asking the real questions. The speed of a closed ecosystem CPUs such as Apple's is irrelevant. As long as Linux or BSD doesnt't run on it in a stable fashion, I'm not interested.

      It's not even that Linux is that great. But Windows and MacOS user experience have degraded so much in the last decade due to user hostile decisions and lack of vision, they essentially nullify advances made on the hardware side.

      POWER should be the real competitor. If only it had laptop class implementations...

      • ricardobeat 33 minutes ago
        What linux distro/desktop do you consider more user friendly than MacOS?

        The best experience I’ve had is with Omarchy 4, but it is not appropriate for average computer users.

  • mdp2021 4 hours ago
    And how much would it cost?

    In the current times performance/price seems to be increasingly important.

    (Not to mention several other factors that once did not even exist, or were irrelevant.)

  • aurareturn 4 hours ago
    Wait. What?

    This is actually the M6 Pro and not the M6. It has 18 CPU cores to the M6's 12. The scores line up as well.

    Reports have said all along that Apple is skipping M6 Pro/Max to focus on M7 generation.

    I can't remember the last time an Apple chip got leaked like this.

  • leptons 3 hours ago
    Under exactly what cooling conditions? And for how long did it sustain this speed?
  • hnd9q09qk4 3 hours ago
    [dead]
  • hncbw02z5a 3 hours ago
    [flagged]
    • rrr_oh_man 3 hours ago
      Load-bearing comment
    • danaris 3 hours ago
      Would you mind elaborating, for those of us who don't live and breathe this stuff?
  • wartywhoa23 4 hours ago
    [flagged]
    • ErneX 3 hours ago
      Title is “highest single core score” so it’s the highest of every cpu tested on geekbench so far, not just of the subset of Apple CPUs.
    • zer0zzz 4 hours ago
      Highest among all CPUs. This isn’t new for Apple. Their stuff frequently bests ryzens etc at single threaded perf
    • nottorp 4 hours ago
      I noticed a whiff of panic at the iphone 18 launch. Opened macrumors and there like 6 articles in a row about preordering the phone, how soon you can get the phone when you preorder, how long the queues are etc.

      Guess they didn't get the expected # of preorders.

      • ErneX 3 hours ago
        That might be true but they do all those pieces with every iPhone launch. They just churn out content a lot during iPhone launch period.
        • nottorp 3 hours ago
          I've never seen 6 in a row before. And that's not counting the "feature list" articles.
      • JSR_FDED 3 hours ago
        I doubt Macrumors knows what the iPhone 18 preorder numbers are.
        • nottorp 2 hours ago
          You actually believe they ran that string of articles on their own initiative?
  • khoirul 1 hour ago
    I will never understand how an intelligent, opinionated crowd like HN can be so obsessed over Apple's CPU offerings. Buying into the Mac ecosystem is without a doubt subjecting oneself to vendor lock-in. Linux won't even run on these machines until in 2-3 years, if you're lucky.
    • brabel 1 hour ago
      What kind of vendor lock in are you talking about?? I use Mac and Linux and don’t feel at all locked in by Apple.
      • pacifika 1 hour ago
        Try and export a few thousand Notes entries with images.

        Change how you like your day to day workflows in terms of window management

        Share a home made app with some friends without helping them install it

        Fix a bug in the vendors software by writing a patch

        • ericmay 56 minutes ago
          This doesn’t sound like vendor lock in to me, but user preferences.
      • crossroadsguy 52 minutes ago
        Running an OS of your choice? Easily? That kind?
    • alpaca128 1 hour ago
      No driver problems (well, first party ones at least), good performance and I can still run any software I like.

      I do prefer and run Linux on my desktop, and could complain about Apple and Mac OS all day. The level of polish is very inconsistent. But despite everything it's still not as user hostile as Windows got nowadays.

      "Linux won't even run on these machines until in 2-3 years, if you're lucky"

      I have yet to buy a Windows machine where Linux works perfectly with no issues whatsoever. My most compatible machine to date needed a USB-C ethernet adapter to get a network connection for more than 10 minutes at a time. So ironically old M series Macs might not be the worst choice given Asahi doesn't need to target every hardware configuration of the last couple decades.

    • websap 1 hour ago
      We love these devices, because these are the best devices overall.
    • GeekyBear 1 hour ago
      An Nvidia GPU involves as much CUDA lock-in as Nvidia can manage, but it's also where the best performance is.

      People care about performance.

    • heavensteeth 1 hour ago
      that doesn't mean it's unimpressive. it's purely a software problem, really.
    • j3th9n 1 hour ago
      I call it vendor cushion-in, all my devices are Apple and they work very well, also together.
  • OsrsNeedsf2P 4 hours ago
    I'm currently in the middle of porting a game from 2004 to run on MacOS via wine. On a 5000$ Macbook Pro, I'm getting about 4 FPS. This has multiple causes, including the game being single threaded and running through Rosetta, but damn is it hard to get good single core performance out of Macbooks.

    Out of curiosity, I also ported the game to arm Linux with fex + upstreamed the wine patches in about a third the time and there's no FPS issues

    • aenis 2 hours ago
      Did you forget to tell Claude to make it run fast?

      (I am not joking. I did a port of an old utility, Dos Navigator, and I gave Claude+Codex a set of KPIs: cold start under 100ms, 30MB RAW image preview under 50ms, and a few others. I went to bed, and I woke up to a file manager written in Swift that is a joy to use, its so fast, esp. when previewing images. If I haven't requested it, it would likely be way slower).

      • Yajirobe 1 hour ago
        How much did it cost you? Or was a subscription-based usage enough?
        • aenis 1 hour ago
          Subscription. Translated to Around $90 in tokens.
    • galad87 3 hours ago
      Running something with "Wine" doesn't usually mean "porting", "porting" means making a native binary that doesn't run through an emulation layer.

      Anyway, probably you are trying to run a 32-bit executable with Rosetta, that won't be fast, because Rosetta was never meant to run 32-bit things and has got a lot of pitfalls.

    • mirsadm 3 hours ago
      If anything it's the exact opposite. They're ridiculously powerful with more memory bandwidth than pretty much any equivalent PC. It is easy to make sloppy software because you can get away with so much.
    • bel8 2 hours ago
      OS/Software is why I don't like macs.

      For me it's like they built a Ferrari with 4 thin bicycle tires. What a waste.

    • CJefferson 3 hours ago
      Something is going horribly wrong. I don't know what it is (without your code I don't know), have you profiled where it's going wrong? There's no way a game for 2004 would be that slow.

      If you want help, I've done some similar work, you could pop it up on a github repo or something. What is the game?

    • SXX 3 hours ago
      What porting you talking about exactly? Packaging existing binaries? Compiling source code making it more compatible with Wine?

      In my experience as game developer and porting C++ code tells such difference usually mean there are something really wrong with syncronization primitives. So 99.99% of the time code does nothing just waiting for something to unlock.

      • sgerenser 1 hour ago
        Yep, I’ve seen issues like this before. Run it in a profiler and you’ll see it only doing useful work like 5% of the time.
    • logicallee 3 hours ago
      Thanks for sharing your experience.

      I recommend you try giving your AI an open ended task like, "it's at 4 fps even though it's a 22 year old game and the raw hardware performance is many orders of magnitude higher. Maybe due to running under Wine and Rosetta. Please figure out the simplest way you can unlock usable performance (30-60 FPS) short of decompiling, reverse engineering, and reimplementing the full game yourself natively. Maybe there is something else you can figure out for the performance unlock. The hardware is definitely there, so there has to be a way. The game is running so make sure you don't break it. Keep the same game behavior."

      Regardless of which AI you're using, it will be able to figure something out in a few hours. 2004 pc's were 500-800 mhz, 128 MB RAM, and if they had a GPU at all it was 16-32 MB, 0.2-1 GLOP.

      Your AI should be able to figure out a way to get it running in realtime.