First M2 Pro benchmarks prove big improvement over M1 Max

Geekbench results seemingly for the M2 Pro Mac mini are of course better than for the M1 version, but they also greatly exceed the M1 Max figures.

Apple has not yet shipped the Mac mini with M2 Pro, but Geekbench now includes an entry for device identified as "Mac14,12". It appears to be the new M2 Pro version of the Mac mini, in its 12-core CPU configuration, with 16GB of unified memory.

Its single-core score is 1952, and multi-core score is 15013.

Benchmark test scores may not give a great indication of how a machine will perform in real-world use, but they do give a point of comparison. Previous Geekbench scores for the M1 Mac mini, then, have scores of 1651 single-core and 5181 multi-core.

Note that this is comparing the M1 with the M2 Pro, not the base M2. But it's still a major difference. And more significantly, Geekbench scores for M1 Max were typically 1727 single-core and 12643 multi-core.

It appears that Apple has successfully increased the performance of the M2 range over the already notably fast M1. However, benchmark tests are also not definitive.

In November 2022, for instance, benchmarks for a Mac with the M2 Max leaked online and appeared to show little improvement. Then in December 2022, a separate benchmark leak showed much better performance.

The M2 Pro Mac mini is available for preorder now and will begin shipping by January 24, 2022.

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34 Comments

DAalseth

said about 1 year ago

But what are the scores for the regular M2 Mac Mini?

EDIT; n/m found them. 1869 sc and 8900 mc.

rob53

said about 1 year ago

I checked Geekbench and they didn't list any Apple M2 Pro Compute scores for Metal.

As a comparison, here's my early 2019 iMac19,1 Core i9 8c, 72GB RAM, 2TB SSD, AMD Radeon Pro Vega 48 (bought son's fully blown iMac used for animation).

Single 1309, 67% of M2 Pro mini
Multi 8021, 53% of M2 Pro mini
Compute Metal 53883
Compute OpenCL 49436
Cost (can't remember but over $5K)

M2 Pro mini, 10/16/16 32GB 2TB $2,299
Studi Display $1,599
Keyboard and Mouse $298 (keyboard with TouchID)
Total $4,096 (funny total because it's 2 to the 12th power) <80% of iMac i9

Wish I could simply plug a Mac mini into my iMac display.

keithw

said about 1 year ago

How about the benchmark(s) for the M2 Max MBP.? That may be a more fair comparison against the M1 Max.

damonf

said about 1 year ago

This is somewhat old news, especially looking at the single-core comparisons. Geekbench shows a single-core score of 1756 for the 2022 Mac Studio with the M1 Max (10 core: 8 high-performance, 2 high-efficiency), but 1900 for the 13-inch 2022 MacBook Pro with the M2 (8 core: 4 high-performance, 4 high-efficiency). Because the M1 Max has double the number of performance cores compared to the base M2, it outperforms the M2 on multicore (Mac Studio M1 Max: 12336, MBP M2: 8735), which should be expected. So with the M2 Pro having the potential for the same count of high-performance cores (8) as the M1 Max, it should come as no surprise that the M2 Pro can exceed the M1 Max on a strictly CPU benchmark test.

The main benefits of the "Max" series are in GPU performance, memory bandwidth (double the Pro series of same generation), and the additional ProRes encoder/decoder. If you look within the same generation (i.e. M1 Pro vs M1 Max), the CPU performance gains on the Max vs the Pro of the same core count are very subtle:

- MBP 16" 2021, M1 Pro (10 core): 1742 single core test, 12141 multi-core test
- MBP 16" 2021, M1 Max (10 core): 1745 single core test, 12191 multi-core test

Source: Mac Benchmarks - Geekbench Browser