Thread

Apple M6 Pro achieves the highest single-core CPU score in Geekbench 7

118 points · 145 comments · gainsurier

GeekyBear · 1789810607 · focus · HN ↗
There are also leaks for the M5 Ultra & Base M6.
M5 Ultra CPU:
<a href="https://browser.geekbench.com/search?k=parkdale_cpu&q=mac17%2C15" rel="nofollow">https://browser.geekbench.com/search?k=parkdale_cpu&q=mac17%...
M5 Ultra GPU:
<a href="https://browser.geekbench.com/search?k=grand_gpu&q=mac17%2C15" rel="nofollow">https://browser.geekbench.com/search?k=grand_gpu&q=mac17%2C1...
Base M6 CPU:
<a href="https://browser.geekbench.com/search?k=parkdale_cpu&q=mac18%2C5" rel="nofollow">https://browser.geekbench.com/search?k=parkdale_cpu&q=mac18%...
Base M6 GPU:
<a href="https://browser.geekbench.com/search?k=grand_gpu&q=mac18%2C5" rel="nofollow">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.
<a href="https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/amd-ryzen-9-9950x3d2" rel="nofollow">https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/amd-ryzen-9-9950x3d...
The Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus averages 2940 on the same test.
<a href="https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/intel-core-ultra-7-270k-plus" rel="nofollow">https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/intel-core-ultra-7-...
1. revolvingthrow · 1789816318 · focus · HN ↗
  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?
  1. kakacik · 1789816685 · focus · HN ↗
    > 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
  2. galad87 · 1789817187 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
  3. snek_case · 1789817433 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
  4. GeekyBear · 1789817690 · focus · HN ↗
    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 · 1789819858 · focus · HN ↗
    > 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.
    thejazzman · 1789829738 · focus · HN ↗
    I would expect cooling pauses to have the opposite effect. The
    MacBook Air/neo are the only ones without fans. Even the Studio Display has a fan
    ajross · 1789840535 · focus · HN ↗
    The cooling pause thing was just a dig at Geekbench, not specific to this discussion (thus putting it in a footnote). They tuned (the last version of their) benchmark specifically to give better numbers on hardware that tends to throttle under performance load.
    Now... you can make a reasonable case that this matches real world interactive load better. But it also happens to have the practical effect of making Apple's numbers better, and no one else's. The new benchmarks are measuring subtly different things, and the new thing they measure happens to be what Apple wants to sell. At best, that's backwards.
    krunkcoin · 1790276535 · focus · HN ↗
    Cooling pauses have been a part of Geekbench forever, they're not just a GB6 thing.
    GB's author, John Poole, has stated the intent of Geekbench CPU is to measure the CPU and CPU alone, as in he doesn't want to measure limits caused by the form factor of the device the CPU under test is embedded in. Since GB runs on phones, that means he had to implement the cooldown pauses.
    Intel's turbo boost means this GB feature almost certainly inflates lots of x86 scores too, even with fans involved. Not sure why you're being so conspiratorial about it.
    [deleted] · 1789833552 · focus · HN ↗
    [deleted]
  5. luxuryballs · 1789818565 · focus · HN ↗
    sounds like it's the software
  6. BoingBoomTschak · 1789818912 · focus · HN ↗
    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 <a href="https://gitlab.com/AOMediaCodec/SVT-AV1/-/tree/master/Source/Lib" rel="nofollow">https://gitlab.com/AOMediaCodec/SVT-AV1/-/tree/master/Source... or <a href="https://github.com/Multicorewareinc/x265/tree/master/source/common" rel="nofollow">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 <a href="https://openbenchmarking.org/vs/Processor/Apple+M4+Pro,AMD+Ryzen+9+9900X+12-Core" rel="nofollow">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 · 1789819389 · focus · HN ↗
    > 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 · 1789819545 · focus · HN ↗
    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 · 1789821150 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    BoingBoomTschak · 1789828474 · focus · HN ↗
    > Nothing prevents a vendor from implementing a high quality hardware encoder
    Uh yes, it's called reality. Advanced video coding techniques are just too complex, full of serial and branch heavy algos to work in decently sized and priced ASIC or even in GPGPU. Which is the reason none exists outside of very expensive special stuff for professional render/streaming farms.
    Not even mentioning that few coding tools are shared between codecs, so while you only need 1 CPU to handle all of them, you'd need almost an ASIC per codec...
    GeekyBear · 1789832722 · focus · HN ↗
    If your claim is true, you won't have any trouble finding reputable tech publications saying that the video output from Apple M series hardware is substandard in some way.
    I'll wait.
    I would recommend you find a floor plan for Apple's M series chips and take a look at how big Apple's media engine is.
    BoingBoomTschak · 1789840505 · focus · HN ↗
    I don't know how to say nicely that you don't realize how ignorant about the field you must seem to anyone who isn't. You'll have trouble finding such comparison for the same reason you won't find a "caterpillar vs motorbike" speed test easily. Everyone in the target market including Apple knows hardware encoding will never be about output quality.
    Anyway, here, I'm feeling nice. Some guy comparing the M1 Pro's HEVC encoder vs x265 (amongst others): <a href="https://colinmckellar.com/2024/01/11/video-encoder-comparison/" rel="nofollow">https://colinmckellar.com/2024/01/11/video-encoder-compariso...
    Here's the only graph you need to look at if you don't want to bother (encoding time vs file size at fixed perceptual quality, log scale axes): <a href="https://colinmckellar.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/VMAF_90.png" rel="nofollow">https://colinmckellar.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/VMAF_90...
    GeekyBear · 1789845221 · focus · HN ↗
    "Some Guy" just doesn't cut it.
    We've got five generations of Apple's Media Engine shipping in M series chips.
    If things are as dire as you claim, one of the many hardware reviews in reputable publications over the years would have mentioned this unacceptable quality at some point.
    timschmidt · 1789864952 · focus · HN ↗
    I'm not BoingBoomTschak who you're replying to, but he's right. My experience comes mostly from decades of reading xiph.org and ffmpeg mailing lists where such things are discussed, rather than implementing them myself. But there is constant discussion of encoder performance / quality trade-offs in software and hardware encoders. Hardware encoders, especially ones attempting to meet strict performance targets, simply cannot take advantage of some of the most complex quality improvements as they depend on information only present in past/future frames. Sometimes as many as 30 frames away.
    It seems like you are interpreting this as a slight against the quality of Apple's hardware encoders, which may legitimately be very good. As are Nvidia's, Intel's and AMD's. But all of them will produce larger file sizes and lower quality than equivalently optimized non-realtime software encoders, which simply have more information and more time, memory, and flexibility to compute over it.
    We're talking about fundamental properties of compression and computational time/space trade-offs. Even Apple can't design around them.
    That doesn't mean Apple's hardware encoder is in any way bad or unusable. All lossy compression will be imperfect, yet much of it is useful. And most modern codecs and encoders seem to be capable of high quality results. The implications of the differences under discussion are percentages of a bitrate or tiny nearly imperceptible artifacts or breadth of available resolutions, refresh rates, and color modes or codec choice. Software encoders are always at the bleeding edge of what's possible. Hardware encoders are necessarily a snapshot frozen in silicon with limitations imposed by the implementation. The middle ground is largely already occupied by SIMD and other transform-specific ISA extensions already present in most CPUs.
    api · 1789821184 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    Archit3ch · 1789831361 · focus · HN ↗
    > AVX still wins though.
    On what, microbenchmarks? I have realtime audio workloads where the hot loop is essentially linear algebra. Exactly the kind of work that suits AVX2/AVX512. Guess what, Apple Silicon still pulls ahead because real workloads are branchy, cache-hungry, full of dependencies and do not line up in 8 neat f64 operations per cycle.
  7. tom_ · 1789821577 · focus · HN ↗
    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) (<a href="https://browser.geekbench.com/v7/cpu/181239" rel="nofollow">https://browser.geekbench.com/v7/cpu/181239)
    * Apple M4 Max: 3552 (single), 29863 (multi) (<a href="https://browser.geekbench.com/v7/cpu/390256" rel="nofollow">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) (<a href="https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+Ryzen+Threadripper+2990WX&id=3309" rel="nofollow">https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+Ryzen+Threadrip...)
    * Apple M4 Max: 4590 (single), 43911 (multi) (<a href="https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Apple+M4+Max+16+Core&id=6348" rel="nofollow">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: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46938682">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.
    bob1029 · 1789824298 · focus · HN ↗
    > If you need a benchmark that makes the PC look massively faster than the Mac, I'm sure those are available too.
    Go check out blender CPU scores if you need any reassurance that AMD still makes some kind of sense.
    <a href="https://opendata.blender.org/benchmarks/query/?compute_type=CPU&blender_version=3.1.0&group_by=device_name" rel="nofollow">https://opendata.blender.org/benchmarks/query/?compute_type=...
    jltsiren · 1789851086 · focus · HN ↗
    Geekbench multi-core has been a single-task benchmark since version 6. The multi-core / single-core score ratio is supposed to tell how much you will benefit on the average when you use all available CPU cores. Some tasks parallelize better, while others have bottlenecks that prevent effective parallelization. For every CPU, the ratio is well below the nominal speedup you can get under ideal circumstances.
    wtallis · 1789853228 · focus · HN ↗
    Note that Geekbench 7 no longer runs the same subtests in multi-core mode as in single-core mode, so any ratio calculated from the overall scores instead of from the individual subtests is misleading. There are a lot of subtests that it only runs in single-core mode and omits from the multi-core tests, seemingly to placate the critics that didn't like the inclusion of poorly-scaling tests in the multi-core mode. It's not as dumb as the Geekbench 5 strategy of just running N independent copies of the test, but it does seem like a dumb change to me.
  8. ksec · 1789823901 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
  9. TiredOfLife · 1789833960 · focus · HN ↗
    Fast video encode was how AMD fans were coping during bulldozer era
2. esperent · 1789817150 · focus · HN ↗
  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.
  <a href="https://signal65.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Signal65-Insights_Qualcomm-Snapdragon-X2-Elite-Extreme-Performance-1.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://signal65.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Signal65-Ins...
  1. GeekyBear · 1789826005 · focus · HN ↗
    Samsung's chips use high end ARM stock cores, and are also ahead of Intel and AMD.
    TiredOfLife · 1789833839 · focus · HN ↗
    Which ones?
3. ksec · 1789824402 · focus · HN ↗
  I know these are all Mac CPU, but for context people may want to look at A20 Pro [1], which in 2 years time will be in MacBook Neo. Pretty damn impressive if you ask me.
  A20 Pro is around 4K on Geekbench 7. And the P-Core is not the same as M6. The A20 Pro is actually only 9 wide compared to 10-wide on M6. Supposedly more power efficient and smaller die size.
  [1] <a href="https://browser.geekbench.com/search?q=iPhone19%2C2" rel="nofollow">https://browser.geekbench.com/search?q=iPhone19%2C2
  1. [deleted] · 1789833026 · focus · HN ↗
    [deleted]

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