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-...
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...
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?
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.
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.
MacBook Air/neo are the only ones without fans. Even the Studio Display has a fan
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.
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.
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.
Go check out blender CPU scores if you need any reassurance that AMD still makes some kind of sense.
https://opendata.blender.org/benchmarks/query/?compute_type=...
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
Anyway, here, I'm feeling nice. Some guy comparing the M1 Pro's HEVC encoder vs x265 (amongst others): 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): https://colinmckellar.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/VMAF_90...
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
The M7 generation has updated the tensor instructions in the GPU cores and they want to ship that ASAP.
I would love to see macOS replacing Windows in virtual desktop environments.
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.
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.
Where does the myth of Apple come from? You should go on blind and ask someone that works there the reality lolol
https://browser.geekbench.com/v7/cpu/singlecore
here are the leaderboards for anyone else who was curious
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.
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.
EDIT: Any Chromebook using a Panther Lake chip, or an upcoming Googlebook ARM, can get you there.
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.
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.
And Windows is not remotely dead yet. Gamers are not selling their PCs and getting Macs.
Not even support for the latest Diablo or Overwatch and absolutely no GTA 6 for example
Been hearing both for the same time.
So this is different and faster than such a result in the old scoring would have implied.
AMD beats Intel, but only by a couple hundred points.
Qualcomm beats them both.
Apple’s are on a “2 nanometer” from 2025
It feels like a crime upgrading from this thing tbh.
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.
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.
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.
Apple has not mentioned M6 Pro anywhere.
Leaked prior to launch - Leaked Benchmarks Confirm M2 Chip is Up to 20% Faster Than M1 https://www.macrumors.com/2022/06/15/m2-geekbench-benchmark/
Leaked prior to announcement - 'M2 Max' Geekbench Scores Leak Online, Revealing Rumored Specs and Performance https://www.macrumors.com/2022/11/30/m2-max-chip-geekbench-r...
Leaked prior to launch - M3 Max Chip Around as Fast as M2 Ultra in Early Benchmark Results https://www.macrumors.com/2023/11/01/m3-max-chip-benchmark-r...
Leaked prior to announcement - Mac M4 Chip Performance Unveiled in First Benchmarks https://www.macrumors.com/2024/10/07/m4-mac-chip-benchmarks/
Leaked prior to launch - M5 Chip Achieves Impressive Feat in 14-Inch MacBook Pro Speed Test https://www.macrumors.com/2025/10/17/m5-chip-macbook-pro-gee...
Leaked prior to launch - Apple's M5 Max Chip Achieves a New Record in First Benchmark Result
https://www.macrumors.com/2026/03/05/m5-max-geekbench-benchm...
Then add this one to the list.
Leaked prior to announcement - Leaked Benchmarks Confirm M2 Chip is Up to 20% Faster Than M1 https://www.macrumors.com/2022/06/15/m2-geekbench-benchmark/
I don't feel like doing it for your other sources. They follow the same pattern. You can check official announcement dates vs "leaked" dates yourself.
[0]https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2022/06/apple-unveils-m2-with...
Those M2 Max Geekbench benchmarks appeared on November 30, 2022. Apple announced the Apple M2 Max chip on January 17, 2023.
Similarly, those M4 Geekbench benchmarks for Mac were leaked on October 6, 2024, prior to Apple announcing the product. Apple announced the M4 Macs on October 28, 2024.
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.)
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...
The best experience I’ve had is with Omarchy 4, but it is not appropriate for average computer users.
Guess they didn't get the expected # of preorders.
IME intelligent people don't have difficulty understanding that different people want different things and that your computing preferences are not objectively more correct than someone else's.
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
Not a problem, I don’t use Apple Notes on my Mac.
> Change how you like your day to day workflows in terms of window management
Not a problem, I can just customize my hammerspoon config to behave differently
> Share a home made app with some friends without helping them install it
That depends more on what my friends are using than what I use. Me using Linux wouldn’t make it any easier if they are using Windows or macOS.
> Fix a bug in the vendors software by writing a patch
Not being able to fix a bug in an OS doesn’t lock me into that OS. And there are bugs in any Linux distribution that are way too complex to fix even if theoretically possible. So it doesn’t make any difference.
A MacBook is pretty much locked to macOS even if it’s theoretically possible to boot a different OS but that doesn’t make me locked into macOS. I can sell my MacBook for a very reasonable price and buy whatever I want.
It does now with LLMs
I always thought I was missing something on the Macs. That must be it. Cheers.
- Native Docker support in-kernel
- High-performance Vulkan drivers
- CUDA support (macOS doesn't sign CUDA drivers for some reason)
- Support for NTFS, FAT32 and other common filesystems without using FUSE
- Better package management with versioned rollback
- System updates that don't force breaking changes
Those are just the ones that stop me from returning to macOS (I left after Catalina).
On my 16gb Macbook Pro, compiling a monorepo for my job. Between the APFS slowdowns and the virtualization overhead, it was faster to build everything in a VPS and download the artifacts onto my Mac.
> About CUDA, mac has great GPUs , so much so that it’s a fad now to buy mini Macs to run LLMs.
Mac GPUs are close to the worst on the market. There's a reason why AMD and Nvidia are being put in datacenters while Apple Silicon isn't. Apple's GPU designs are a waste of electricity for LLM inference. My RTX 3070 Ti cost $500, is fabbed on Samsung's 8nm node and beats the 5nm M2 Ultra's GPU in power efficiency. That's how bad Apple Silicon GPUs are for compute.
> I don’t know about why you would use those file system
NTFS and ExFAT are the two most-common filesystems of all time. Almost all flash drives and external drives are formatted like this, not HFS or APFS.
> Package management is awesome on Mac with brew
Brew is a dependency graph nightmare. You should be using Nix on macOS if you're a developer, it handles things like side-by-side package versioning and environment isolation much nicer than Homebrew does. Brew works okay for simple app installation, but is basically a torture device if you use it professionally.
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.
People care about performance.
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
(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).
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.
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.
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?
For me it's like they built a Ferrari with 4 thin bicycle tires. What a waste.
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.