# Apple M2 Max Geekbench scores



## Pier (Dec 1, 2022)

First M2 Max benchmark scores appear to leak on Geekbench


If the scores are legit, they show fairly modest gains compared to the M1 Max.




arstechnica.com





These are the alleged results:

https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/18972971

If these are real they are quite disappointing.

Apple made a big jump from Intel to M1, but going from M1 to M2 has been quite meh.


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## eakwarren (Dec 1, 2022)

Perhaps money better spent in RAM upgrades rather than CPU this round.


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## Jett Hitt (Dec 1, 2022)

They can probably do more, but you can bet they counted the beans to know precisely how to maximize profit for the foreseeable future.


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## StefanoM (Dec 1, 2022)

Mmmm , interesting...Not so a beast...this M2 MAX

This is My Machine ( no overclock ) with a 13900K but is running on a POOR MB B660 ( 160 euro of MB)
Next I Will change my MB with a better z790.

On a Z790 it performs even better... 2260 single core and about 24.000 Multi core ( no overclock), always Geekbench.

So Considering an ipotetic M2 ULTRA ( *2 M2 MAX ) , that machine should be more powerful in multi-core on syntetic test then a i9 13900K on Z690 and without Overclocking ( with overclocking other story).

But for a Machine with a M2 Ultra will be about 5000 euro.

And the single core probable will be always better on a 13900K

That is Just a consideration from a PC / Mac User Like me.


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## Pier (Dec 1, 2022)

Yeah power efficiency is amazing but Apple still hasn't beat AMD or Intel in raw performance.

Top CPUs right now in single core perf






If you check multicore, Apple is not even close to the top of the chart.









PassMark Intel vs AMD CPU Benchmarks - High End


PassMark Software - CPU Benchmarks - Over 1 million CPUs and 1,000 models benchmarked and compared in graph form, updated daily!



www.cpubenchmark.net


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## mauriziodececco (Dec 2, 2022)

You should also consider that the M1/M2 are not *just* CPUs, but SOCs; so, GPU performance should be considered and also other factors like Neural engine and memory bandwith; memory bandwith improvement may be important with real applications using multiple elements of the SOC. OK, for pure music production a 50% increase in GPU performance may be less important (unless GPU AUdio show me wrong , but a product, the difference between M1 and M2 (and M1 Max and M2 Max) should not measured only on CPU performance


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## Pier (Dec 2, 2022)

mauriziodececco said:


> You should also consider that the M1/M2 are not *just* CPUs, but SOCs; so, GPU performance should be considered and also other factors like Neural engine and memory bandwith; memory bandwith improvement may be important with real applications using multiple elements of the SOC. OK, for pure music production a 50% increase in GPU performance may be less important (unless GPU AUdio show me wrong , but a product, the difference between M1 and M2 (and M1 Max and M2 Max) should not measured only on CPU performance


True but again Nvidia and AMD are way ahead of Apple in GPU performance.

Not in efficiency though. Of course the ARM Apple laptops are amazing but on desktop it's another story.


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## titokane (Dec 2, 2022)

They're still holding back that M-series Mac Pro. Sure, it'll probably just be two Mac Studios in a trench coat, but I'm interested to see what the price for power ends up looking like on the big machine.


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## mauriziodececco (Dec 2, 2022)

Pier said:


> True but again Nvidia and AMD are way ahead of Apple in GPU performance.
> 
> Not in efficiency though. Of course the ARM Apple laptops are amazing but on desktop it's another story.


Of course, i was purely referring to the M1/M2 family comparison


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## Olympum (Dec 2, 2022)

If bet that Apple right now, in the middle of a recession impacting consumers, and most importantly with limited to no supply of chips to China, and with 12-18 months to go till TSMC's new plant will start production in the US ... is stalling their SoC R&D. So let's get ready to see no amazing specs on Macs and iPhones for the next year or two.


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## gsilbers (Dec 5, 2022)

Pier said:


> Yeah power efficiency is amazing but Apple still hasn't beat AMD or Intel in raw performance.
> 
> Top CPUs right now in single core perf
> 
> ...



I coudnt find a apple specific benchmark in that site but i liked it better than others. Also showing price, my goodness thats pricey for the top amd. 

But seeing from the mac benchmarks



Mac Benchmarks - Geekbench Browser



And how it compares with m1 single core it does seem true how m2 only about 11% better to m1. With that said, seeing other threads about m1 ultra vs max where most composers seem very happy with the power of max and some saying ultra is overkill maybe its ok that these are not as fast as AMD/intel in the high end but still offer great perfromance and heat performance for most tasks. 
Apple didnt ever really playball in the top performing cpu vs windows and mostly had good performance for most pros and its prices where about the same once someone build a comparable multicore pc outside i7. Xeons where expensive. 

After buying a very expensive i9 macbook to have it be a jet plane in noise level and an oven in heat level, itll be a while until id say an intel cpu is worth it no matter the cpu speed. Man , they did really drop the ball. 

The mac pro seems it will have double the max or ultra in cores and might be m2 based on rumors and info. Which is similar to current mac pro intel where the single core is fast but its specialty is the multicore. 

Im waiting for the next generation mac studio just to make sure it doesnt flop like the trashcan or the upgrade cycle is so fast id should wait until the new ones comes out. Plus all the issues there might be with hardware and plugins not working. 
Also, maybe the m1 ultra mac studio could be much discounted once the new one comes out. the one i want is like $5k :( so a 1k discount would be very nice.


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## vitocorleone123 (Dec 6, 2022)

This was entirely predictable, though.

Apple doesn't seem interested (or perhaps even able) to compete with the raw power of the competitors. Efficiency has been its interest, and the others can't compete there and still have raw power.

If you need a powerful laptop where the battery lasts more than 2 or 3 hours, Mac is the way to go. If you need the most powerful PC, Intel/AMD is the way to go.

Making any choice contrary to the above seems more an emotional choice than logical one, though Apple excels at trapping you in their ecosystem, so it's easier to switch to using Apple than it is to stop.


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## Jett Hitt (Dec 6, 2022)

vitocorleone123 said:


> Apple excels at trapping you in their ecosystem, so it's easier to switch to using Apple than it is to stop.


They sold me some crack 38 years ago, and I just sold a kidney to get my latest fix.


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## Pier (Dec 6, 2022)

vitocorleone123 said:


> This was entirely predictable, though.
> 
> Apple doesn't seem interested (or perhaps even able) to compete with the raw power of the competitors. Efficiency has been its interest, and the others can't compete there and still have raw power.
> 
> ...


Yeah but Apple still hasn't released their ARM tower Mac Pro. That machine should be a lot more powerful in both CPU and GPU where efficiency doesn't really matter much.

I wonder why they haven't released it yet. Is Apple just being Apple and taking its time to design the thing or have they reached a limit with their ARM tech? Maybe they want to make it modular and haven't found a way to do that with their current architecture.


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## HCMarkus (Dec 6, 2022)

vitocorleone123 said:


> Making any choice contrary to the above seems more an emotional choice than logical one, though Apple excels at trapping you in their ecosystem, so it's easier to switch to using Apple than it is to stop.


Maybe emotional to a degree, but for me the move from Cheesegrater to Mac Studio was also practical... simple and smooth, projects completely transferable (DP) and an extremely gratifying level of increased performance. I have yet to hit the CPU wall regardless of project size, so color me very happy.


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## vitocorleone123 (Dec 6, 2022)

Pier said:


> Yeah but Apple still hasn't released their ARM tower Mac Pro. That machine should be a lot more powerful in both CPU and GPU where efficiency doesn't really matter much.
> 
> I wonder why they haven't released it yet. Is Apple just being Apple and taking its time to design the thing or have they reached a limit with their ARM tech? Maybe they want to make it modular and haven't found a way to do that with their current architecture.


Price/performance maybe, as well? I mean, the latest Xeon and Epyc processors with 64 cores or whatever (I don't know the details as these are way beyond my price range) are no slouches... which one would hope to be the case for $5k+ each! The new Epycs are going up to 96 cores.

But it's not JUST the CPU, but the whole platform that needs to be tuned and usable outside of a server environment. This is where Apple can also take the lead.


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## sourcefor (Dec 6, 2022)

Is anybody getting cpu spikes on their m1 machine running in Rosetta mode? I am!


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## thevisi0nary (Dec 6, 2022)

M2 is just a slight architecture revamp + 2 cores in the case of the M2 max as far as CPU perf is concerned. It’s still on the same 5nm, there will be a bigger jump with the next iteration when there is a die shrink.


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## gsilbers (Dec 6, 2022)

HEre is some relavant info related to m2


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## Pier (Dec 6, 2022)

gsilbers said:


> HEre is some relavant info related to m2



Lots of great info on that video like the Mac Studio with 64 cores not scaling properly and bottlenecking. His conspiracy theory about the Mac Pro makes total sense.


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## Michael Antrum (Dec 6, 2022)

Pier said:


> Yeah but Apple still hasn't released their ARM tower Mac Pro. That machine should be a lot more powerful in both CPU and GPU where efficiency doesn't really matter much.
> 
> I wonder why they haven't released it yet. Is Apple just being Apple and taking its time to design the thing or have they reached a limit with their ARM tech? Maybe they want to make it modular and haven't found a way to do that with their current architecture.


Apple are struggling to get their iPhones out in a timely fashion. They are switching production to other countries to try and smooth it out and not be so reliant on one country.

Why would you release new product you can't supply......


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## Pier (Dec 6, 2022)

Michael Antrum said:


> Apple are struggling to get their iPhones out in a timely fashion. They are switching production to other countries to try and smooth it out and not be so reliant on one country.
> 
> Why would you release new product you can't supply......


Yeah OTOH Apple sells a lot more iPhones than Macs, let alone Mac Pros.


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## BassClef (Dec 6, 2022)

OK... guess I’ll hang onto my M1 Studio Ultra a little longer!


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## gsilbers (Dec 7, 2022)

BassClef said:


> OK... guess I’ll hang onto my M1 Studio Ultra a little longer!


Did you not like the studio ultra?


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## BassClef (Dec 7, 2022)

gsilbers said:


> Did you not like the studio ultra?


Sorry... just kidding. I love my Mac Studio Ultra. I have no intentions of buying a new M2 version (when one comes out) just to gain another 15% in performance.


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## xepocal (Dec 7, 2022)

I assume it's a case of Apple having implemented most of the low-hanging-fruit items in M1 already. Iterating is harder than starting from scratch after identifying what's wrong with an existing architecture (x64 - CPU + GPU with non-unified memory).


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## davidson (Dec 9, 2022)

Apple still haven't released their double-sided ultra yet so the multi-core tables are kinda skewed as far as mac vs pc. Judging by previous figures, it'll return 80k+, and even more if they use M2 as a basis. But yeah, AMD can hold the crown this week, then pass it on to apple, who'll pass it on to intel etc etc. In the meantime we can all continue to use our amazing supercomputers to shit out little 8-bar ditties.


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## robgb (Dec 9, 2022)

People don't seem to understand that the integrated RAM makes all the difference. My Intel machine struggles doing tasks that my M1 breezes through. You can't appreciate the difference until you've actually experienced it.

As for the difference between M1 and M2, I'm not sure why you were expecting much of a leap. Changes from here on out will likely be incremental.


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## Eloy (Dec 9, 2022)

New Benchmarks:









'M2 Max' Geekbench Scores Surface Again Online Ahead of Release in 2023


Last month, Geekbench scores for an unannounced Mac running the upcoming M2 Max chip surfaced online, showing only minor performance increases...




www.macrumors.com










Mac14,6 - Geekbench Browser


Benchmark results for a Mac14,6 with an Apple M2 Max processor.



browser.geekbench.com


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## vitocorleone123 (Dec 9, 2022)

davidson said:


> Apple still haven't released their double-sided ultra yet so the multi-core tables are kinda skewed as far as mac vs pc. Judging by previous figures, it'll return 80k+, and even more if they use M2 as a basis. But yeah, AMD can hold the crown this week, then pass it on to apple, who'll pass it on to intel etc etc. In the meantime we can all continue to use our amazing supercomputers to shit out little 8-bar ditties.


I really doubt Apple can compete on the high, top end where the focus is performance over all. Or want to.


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## clonewar (Dec 9, 2022)

To me the bigger upgrade with the M2 architecture is 50% more RAM capacity. If that scales up then a Mac Studio with the M2 Ultra should be configurable with 192 GB.


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## Justin L. Franks (Dec 9, 2022)

clonewar said:


> To me the bigger upgrade with the M2 architecture is 50% more RAM capacity. If that scales up then a Mac Studio with the M2 Ultra should be configurable with 192 GB.


And 48 GB with the M2 Pro for the laptops. That will be a great machine for most of us without being very expensive (should be well under $3,000 for a 14" M2 Pro / 48 GB / 1 TB SSD, or right at $3,000 with a 2 TB SSD).

Right now to get more than 32 GB of RAM you need the M1 Max, which for a 14" with 64 GB / 1 TB SSD is $3500.

And if there is an M2 Pro Mac Mini with a 48 GB RAM option, that is probably going to be a great value for us IMO.


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