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Apple's M5 Max Chip Achieves a New Record in First Benchmark Result

The first Geekbench 6 result for a 16-inch MacBook Pro with the M5 Max chip surfaced today, and Apple has achieved record-breaking performance.

Apple M5 Pro M5 Max chips
In this unconfirmed result, the M5 Max with an 18-core CPU achieved a score of 29,233 for multi-core CPU performance, which tops the 27,726 score achieved by the Mac Studio's M3 Ultra chip with a 32-core CPU. M5 Max is now the fastest Apple silicon chip ever, and it even topped every other consumer PC processor in the Geekbench database.

In terms of multi-core CPU performance, the M5 Max is up to 5% faster than the M3 Ultra, and up to 14% to 15% faster than the M4 Max chip with a 16-core CPU.

Mac Model Multi-Core CPU Score
MacBook Pro (M5 Max) 29,233
Mac Studio (M3 Ultra) 27,726
MacBook Pro (M4 Max) 25,702
MacBook Pro (M4 Pro) 22,490
Mac Studio (M2 Ultra) 21,410
MacBook Pro (M3 Max) 20,960
Mac Studio (M1 Ultra) 18,434
MacBook Air (M5) 17,073
MacBook Pro (M3 Pro) 15,260
MacBook Pro (M2 Max) 14,740
MacBook Air (M4) 14,731
MacBook Pro (M2 Pro) 14,451
MacBook Pro (M1 Max) 12,345
MacBook Pro (M1 Pro) 12,345
MacBook Air (M3) 12,020
MacBook Air (M2) 9,709
MacBook Neo (A18 Pro) 8,668
MacBook Air (M1) 8,342

As for single-core CPU performance, the M5 Max with an 18-core CPU achieved a score of 4,268 in this single Geekbench result, which is line with the regular M5 chip in the base model 14-inch MacBook Pro released back in October. This is the highest single-core score of any consumer PC processor ever, topping the AMD Ryzen 9 series.

As for graphics, the M5 Max with a 40-core GPU achieved impressive Metal scores of 218,772 in one result and 232,718 in another. These scores are anywhere from 5% to 10% lower than the highest-end M3 Ultra's average Metal score of 245,053, and a little more than 20% higher than the highest-end M4 Max's average Metal score of 191,600.

All in all, the M5 Max offers up to 15% faster CPU performance and up to 20% faster GPU performance compared to the M4 Max, in line with Apple's advertised figures.

MacBook Pro models with M5 Pro and M5 Max are available to pre-order now, and they will begin arriving to customers and launch in stores on March 11.

Related Roundup: MacBook Pro
Buyer's Guide: MacBook Pro (Buy Now)
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Top Rated Comments

21 weeks ago
Really hope they come out with a M5 Ultra with 1TB+ memory Studio.. literally everyone wants to run local LLMs. Come on Apple!
Score: 32 Votes (Like | Disagree)
ghostface147 Avatar
21 weeks ago
That’s it! Trading in my M4 Max 16” MBPro for an M5 Max same model, must open Excel up to 15% faster!
Score: 24 Votes (Like | Disagree)
exodiusprime Avatar
21 weeks ago
It's always amazing to see how far technology advances 🤯 Things that seem bleeding-fast now will seem ancient years later 🫠 Been using an M1 Pro for a minute, but it may be time to upgrade soon!
Score: 13 Votes (Like | Disagree)
Joe Rossignol Avatar
21 weeks ago
All in all, the M5 Max offers up to 15% faster CPU performance and up to 20% faster GPU performance compared to the M4 Max, in line with Apple's advertised figures.

Apple Newsroom quotes below.

"The new CPU architecture offers up to 15 percent higher multithreaded performance when compared to M4 Max."

Geekbench shows around 14% to 15% ✅

"The graphics performance for M5 Max is up to 20 percent higher than M4 Max."

Geekbench shows around 20% to 21% ✅
Score: 10 Votes (Like | Disagree)
bradman83 Avatar
21 weeks ago

The improvement over M4 max is only 14%? That’s not a lot. In the worst intel days the improvements are around 5%
Apple focused on CPU gains with the M4 and GPU gains with the M5. While the CPU increase is modest the GPU increase should be substantial; the base M4's Geekbench 6 Metal score averaged 54000 vs. the M5's average 74000, which is almost a 40% increase.
Score: 8 Votes (Like | Disagree)
21 weeks ago

The improvement over M4 max is only 14%? That’s not a lot. In the worst intel days the improvements are around 5%
well, that's likely due to fact of them deciding to use less performance cores and achieve a small gain over a larger one to improve battery instead. that's theory anyways. remember an m3 max is 12 performance and only 4 effiicency, this thing is basically 6 performance and 12 "balanced" cores which is to say they're supposedly better than efficiency but not as good as performance cores.

could you imagine if they actually did have 12 performance (ie super cores now) and 6 balanced? but i imagine with how delayed M5 was too they gotta save some oomf for M6 too.
Score: 7 Votes (Like | Disagree)

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