Leaked M1 Ultra Mac Studio benchmarks prove it outclasses top Mac Pro

Benchmark results for Apple's recently announced M1 Ultra chip have surfaced, revealing just how significant the performance gains in the Mac Studio are versus the highest-end Mac Pro and MacBook Pro with M1 Max processor.

The benchmark results were published at around 4 p.m. Eastern on Monday, a few hours after Apple's "Peek Performance" event. During the event, Apple unveiled its new M1 Ultra chip, which essentially combines two M1 Max chips in a single package.

Apple's M1 Ultra chip achieved a 1,793 score in single-core Geekbench 5 testing and a 24,055 score in multi-core score testing.

A source inside Apple not authorized to speak on behalf of the company confirmed to AppleInsider that the benchmarks are indeed authentic.

For comparison, Apple's Mac Pro with a 28-core Intel Xeon W scored an average of 1,152 in single-core Geekbench 5 testing and a multi-core score of 19,951.

What that means, essentially, is that the M1 Ultra is 21% faster than the top-tier Mac Pro with an Intel chip in multi-core performance. When it comes to single-core performance, M1 Ultra is 56% faster, which is in-line with Apple's own claimed benchmarks.

The M1 Max, which is currently available in Apple's MacBook Pro, achieved a single-core score of 1,739 and a multi-core score of 11,680 in the same Geekbench testing. While the single-core scores are roughly comparable, the M1 Ultra's multi-core scores are 105% higher than the M1 Max.

Apple's new Mac Studio starts at $3,999 for a model with an M1 Ultra chip. It's currently available to preorder starting March 8 and in theory, will ship out to customers on Friday, March 18. However, orders are already seeing delays into April and May for some configurations.

64 Comments

viclauyyc 847 comments · 10 Years

About 2 years ago

Well, it looks good on number in the presentation. But let’s not forget the Ultra is comparing with a 2 year old Xeon. 2 years is a lot in computer technology. Not to mention, arguably AMD’s Epyc is the fastest CPU in the PC world.

Let’s hope the future Mac Pro will be even faster with 4/8 sets of CPU. But it might cost $8000 on the entry model.

sflocal 6133 comments · 16 Years

viclauyyc said:

Well, it looks good on number in the presentation. But let’s not forget the Ultra is comparing with a 2 year old Xeon. 2 years is a lot in computer technology. Not to mention, arguably AMD’s Epyc is the fastest CPU in the PC world.
Let’s hope the future Mac Pro will be even faster with 4/8 sets of CPU. But it might cost $8000 on the entry model.

Intel's offerings until just recently have remained stagnant on the Xeon side. It's only right to compare it with Apple's current Mac Pro offerings, even though it's 2 years old. It's still incredible how Apple has pushed the performance envelope in those two years where Intel was nowhere to be seen.

While AMD's offerings is also impressive, when compared in terms of performance-per-watt, ASi outperforms them both.

StrangeDays 12959 comments · 8 Years

viclauyyc said:

Well, it looks good on number in the presentation. But let’s not forget the Ultra is comparing with a 2 year old Xeon. 2 years is a lot in computer technology. Not to mention, arguably AMD’s Epyc is the fastest CPU in the PC world.
Let’s hope the future Mac Pro will be even faster with 4/8 sets of CPU. But it might cost $8000 on the entry model.

Can you point us to a newer Intel offering that is in production and faster?

If not, this sentiment is irrelevant. There is also something faster in development.

melgross 33607 comments · 20 Years

Well, I was hoping to be able to test this myself soon, but apparently, even though I ordered a couple of minutes after the store went live, I’ll be waiting sometime into April for the monitor and until late April and possibly early May for the computer.

i’m using the 16” Macbook Pro with 32 graphics cores and 64GB RAM now, so I’m really interested to find out how close to a doubling in performances I’ll see with this. Double the rendering engines as well. That should prove interesting.

I'm a bit disappointed in the monitor though. I was hoping for a model that was somewhat more expensive, with miniLED, and possibly even 6K, as I’m hoping the new higher end monitor expected to come out will also use MiniLED, an advance over what it has now, and possibly go to 8K, though now I’m reading something about 7k, which is an odd resolution. But I bought this new one anyway. From what I’m reading, it should be somewhat better than the present iMac versions.

StrangeDays said:

viclauyyc said:

Well, it looks good on number in the presentation. But let’s not forget the Ultra is comparing with a 2 year old Xeon. 2 years is a lot in computer technology. Not to mention, arguably AMD’s Epyc is the fastest CPU in the PC world.
Let’s hope the future Mac Pro will be even faster with 4/8 sets of CPU. But it might cost $8000 on the entry model.

Can you point us to a newer Intel offering that is in production and faster?

If not, this sentiment is irrelevant. There is also something faster in development.

https://technical.city/en/cpu/Xeon-W-3275M-vs-Xeon-Platinum-8380
https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-intel_xeon_w_3275-1160-vs-amd_epyc_7763-1908