Early M3 MacBook Air benchmarks aren't surprising

13-inch MacBook Air and 15-inch MacBook Air

Apple introduced its M3 MacBook Air lineup on Monday, adding the 3-nanometer chip to its thin and light notebook line. Less than 24 hours later, what appear to be the first benchmarks for the new models have surfaced.

The benchmarks for the M3 models, found in the Geekbench 6 database by MySmartPrice on Tuesday, show a MacBook Air sporting the M3 chip. The results claim it managed 3,157 points for single-core testing and 12,020 for multi-core.

By comparison, the Geekbench chart shows the 15-inch MacBook Air with M2 as reaching 2,595 for the single-core test and 9,744 for the multi-core. This equates to an approximate performance improvement of about 20% over the M2 MacBook Air.

While the results may be faked, they do appear to be in the right ballpark for the M3 chip. The 14-inch MacBook Pro with M3 is listed as scoring 3,085 for the single-core test and 11,561 for the multi-core version.

It's worth remembering that this is also just one benchmark result for the M3 MacBook Air, whereas the main listings for the others are based on averages. It's possible that the result is real, but an optimal result submitted instead, and that it could reduce closer to the MacBook Pro result with more submissions.

The listing for the benchmark also adds that the model tested has the 10-core GPU variant, as well as 16GB of memory.