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Apple M6 Pro achieves the highest single-core CPU score in Geekbench 7
- galad87 15d agoCool, but Apple didn't announce any M6 Pro yet, so where is this coming from?
- mdp2021 15d agoProbably internal tests? 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.
- tristanj 15d agoInternal leaks, these happen frequently. Employees have access to these devices for months prior to launch. Someone ran a benchmark and uploaded it on a machine they weren't supposed to.
- gizajob 15d agoI find that hard to believe at Apple. Not even possible that it’s accidental. They have their own internal tools, all packets leaving the network will be interrogated, leaking data is a sackable offence… if it’s in the geekbench database then it’s there because they put it there.
- swiftcoder 15d ago> Not even possible that it’s accidental. They have their own internal tools, all packets leaving the network will be interrogated, leaking data is a sackable offence 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.
- VerifiedReports 15d agoPeople love to tell stories about how stuff is done at Apple, which are often utter bullshit. 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.
- dainiusse 15d ago+1 . The only case it is allowed is Apple's own marketing team.
- discordance 15d agoIt’s happened in the past. Like that employee who left the unreleased iPhone in a bar by accident.
- aenis 15d agoThe details of the Apple vs. OpenAI dispute over leaked data show their security is not quite that tight.
- mathisfun123 15d ago> I find that hard to believe at Apple Where does the myth of Apple come from? You should go on blind and ask someone that works there the reality lolol
- gizajob 15d agoYou think they need geekbench to verify how fast their chips run?
- mathisfun123 15d agoNo I think Apple employees run geekbench for fun and don't care the stats get uploaded (you know just like other normal careless humans rather than demigods)
- akmarinov 14d agoJust recently there was the OpenAI vs Apple trial, where it came out that employees that left the company still had access to their internal net, sooo super plausible
- shim__ 15d agoHow does Geekbench even verify what CPU I'm using? Couldnt you inject forged data and add a even faster M100?
- fartfeatures 15d agoI thought they were skipping the M6 pro chips (or is that just the max and ultra?) to accelerate AI focused M7.
- SXX 15d agoThis was just rumors like 99% of other Apple-related news.
- rbanffy 15d agoSpeaking of rumours, Apple is reportedly developing a server box with multiple top of the line chips. I would love to see macOS replacing Windows in virtual desktop environments.
- testing22321 15d agoWe know they have them for internal use, it seems crazy they won’t sell a box with, 2 or 4 or 8 or 10 Ultras crammed in.
- GeekyBear 15d agoThe word was that they weren't going to ship systems with the M6 Pro, Max or Ultra. The M7 generation has updated the tensor instructions in the GPU cores and they want to ship that ASAP.
- CerebralCoding 15d agoI haven’t heard about the updated tensor instructions before - got any sources?
- reitzensteinm 15d agoIf they’re rushing the M7, it’s possible the M6 Pro and Max will be MacBook Ultra only. It would certainly give it quite a halo.
- aurareturn 15d agoWait. What? 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.
- tristanj 15d agoThese have leaked pretty much every single year for the M-series chips, a few weeks before launch. Occasionally for the A-series.
- aurareturn 15d agoNo, not the same. Those are review samples who got sent the product early. Those "leaks" happen AFTER the products have been officially announced by Apple. Apple has not mentioned M6 Pro anywhere.
- tristanj 15d agoNot accurate, both leak very frequently. 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/ 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-results/ 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-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/ 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-geekbench-benchmark/ 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-benchmarks/ https://www.macrumors.com/2026/03/05/m5-max-geekbench-benchm... Then add this one to the list.
- mdp2021 15d agoAnd how much would it cost? 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.)
- wartywhoa23 15d ago[flagged]
- ErneX 15d agoTitle is “highest single core score” so it’s the highest of every cpu tested on geekbench so far, not just of the subset of Apple CPUs.
- nottorp 15d agoI noticed a whiff of panic at the iphone 18 launch. Opened macrumors and there like 6 articles in a row about preordering the phone, how soon you can get the phone when you preorder, how long the queues are etc. Guess they didn't get the expected # of preorders.
- ErneX 15d agoThat might be true but they do all those pieces with every iPhone launch. They just churn out content a lot during iPhone launch period.
- nottorp 15d agoI've never seen 6 in a row before. And that's not counting the "feature list" articles.
- JSR_FDED 15d agoI doubt Macrumors knows what the iPhone 18 preorder numbers are.
- nottorp 15d agoYou actually believe they ran that string of articles on their own initiative?
- zer0zzz 15d agoHighest among all CPUs. This isn’t new for Apple. Their stuff frequently bests ryzens etc at single threaded perf
- OsrsNeedsf2P 15d agoI'm currently in the middle of porting a game from 2004 to run on MacOS via wine. On a 5000$ Macbook Pro, I'm getting about 4 FPS. This has multiple causes, including the game being single threaded and running through Rosetta, but damn is it hard to get good single core performance out of Macbooks. 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
- mirsadm 15d agoIf anything it's the exact opposite. They're ridiculously powerful with more memory bandwidth than pretty much any equivalent PC. It is easy to make sloppy software because you can get away with so much.
- SXX 15d agoWhat porting you talking about exactly? Packaging existing binaries? Compiling source code making it more compatible with Wine? 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.
- sgerenser 15d agoYep, I’ve seen issues like this before. Run it in a profiler and you’ll see it only doing useful work like 5% of the time.
- galad87 15d agoRunning something with "Wine" doesn't usually mean "porting", "porting" means making a native binary that doesn't run through an emulation layer. 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.
- logicallee 15d agoThanks for sharing your experience. 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.
- a3w 15d ago>4k? Thought not would barely twice that of an 15 year old CPU, but it of course is geekbench 7, not 6 or 5! So this is different and faster than such a result in the old scoring would have implied.
- fsh 15d agoIt is not quite twice the score of a 6 year old Apple M1 though. And this is with much higher clock speeds (4.8 GHz vs. 3.2 GHz).
- alasano 15d agoShame, I only upgrade my M1 for chips that are at least twice as fast. It feels like a crime upgrading from this thing tbh.
- rbanffy 15d agoRecently I have upgraded for memory capacity.
- alasano 15d agoJokes aside yeah I'm definitely in need of a ram upgrade. Or I have to learn how to close Firefox tabs. 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.
- alpaca128 15d ago"Or I have to learn how to close Firefox tabs" 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.
- GeekyBear 15d agoThe M1 is about 1700 on Geekbench 7 single core.
- leptons 15d agoUnder exactly what cooling conditions? And for how long did it sustain this speed?
- hncbw02z5a 15d ago[flagged]
- rrr_oh_man 15d agoLoad-bearing comment
- danaris 15d agoWould you mind elaborating, for those of us who don't live and breathe this stuff?
- GeekyBear 15d agoThere are also leaks for the M5 Ultra & Base M6. M5 Ultra CPU: https://browser.geekbench.com/search?k=parkdale_cpu&q=mac17%2C15 https://browser.geekbench.com/search?k=parkdale_cpu&q=mac17%... M5 Ultra GPU: https://browser.geekbench.com/search?k=grand_gpu&q=mac17%2C15 https://browser.geekbench.com/search?k=grand_gpu&q=mac17%2C1... Base M6 CPU: https://browser.geekbench.com/search?k=parkdale_cpu&q=mac18%2C5 https://browser.geekbench.com/search?k=parkdale_cpu&q=mac18%... Base M6 GPU: https://browser.geekbench.com/search?k=grand_gpu&q=mac18%2C5 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-9-9950x3d2 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-7-270k-plus https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/intel-core-ultra-7-...
- revolvingthrow 15d agoI don’t understand those benchmarks. 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?
- kakacik 15d ago> Are benchmarks bullshit when comparing different architectures? 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
- galad87 15d agoWhich version of svt-av1 are you using? Neon optimisations were added quite recently in svt-av1, and are still a bit incomplete, so it might make a difference.
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- hnd9q09qk4 15d ago[dead]
- asimovDev 15d agohttps://www.cpubenchmark.net/single-thread/ https://www.cpubenchmark.net/single-thread/ https://browser.geekbench.com/v7/cpu/singlecore https://browser.geekbench.com/v7/cpu/singlecore here are the leaderboards for anyone else who was curious
- louwrentius 15d agoIt's insane to me that the fastest Mac chip is almost a fifth faster than the fastest Intel chip for a fraction of the power budget.
- Footprint0521 15d agoThe moment AAA gaming becomes possible on macOS, the floodgates open and windows is dead
- eahm 15d agoNot going to happen, Linux already won, doesn’t look like it but you’ll see. 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.
- brabel 15d agoWhy will you never buy a Mac even if they are making the best hardware available? Money or ideology?
- pacifika 15d agoLock-in: ownership over user choice and data
- eahm 15d agoI think it's neither, it all comes down to peace of mind and that's the true future of technology. 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.
- rbanffy 15d agoHas anyone tried to run Geekbench on POWER11 or a Telum II?
- speed_spread 15d agoAh, asking the real questions. The speed of a closed ecosystem CPUs such as Apple's is irrelevant. As long as Linux or BSD doesnt't run on it in a stable fashion, I'm not interested. 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...
- ricardobeat 15d agoWhat linux distro/desktop do you consider more user friendly than MacOS? The best experience I’ve had is with Omarchy 4, but it is not appropriate for average computer users.
- bigyabai 14d agoI genuinely think that GNOME is more user-friendly than macOS by a wide margin. The majority of computer users today are familiar with either Windows or iOS/Android primarily. They're not coming from UNIX CDE machines or Macs on-average, they want a desktop that behaves like their phone does and reinforces/rewards their intuition from Windows. They want to click (X) on a window to confidently close it, they want to mash the Start key to search for an app, they want to tap "Install" on a storefront instead of dragging a DMG icon into ~/Applications. All of the little idiosyncrasies that macOS clings to doesn't help people learn it.
- khoirul 15d agoI will never understand how an intelligent, opinionated crowd like HN can be so obsessed over Apple's CPU offerings. Buying into the Mac ecosystem is without a doubt subjecting oneself to vendor lock-in. Linux won't even run on these machines until in 2-3 years, if you're lucky.
- websap 15d agoWe love these devices, because these are the best devices overall.
- j3th9n 15d agoI call it vendor cushion-in, all my devices are Apple and they work very well, also together.
- GeekyBear 15d agoAn Nvidia GPU involves as much CUDA lock-in as Nvidia can manage, but it's also where the best performance is. People care about performance.
- heavensteeth 15d agothat doesn't mean it's unimpressive. it's purely a software problem, really.
- brabel 15d agoWhat kind of vendor lock in are you talking about?? I use Mac and Linux and don’t feel at all locked in by Apple.
- pacifika 15d agoTry and export a few thousand Notes entries with images. 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
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- gainsurier 15d agoSorry everyone, this submission appears to be forged—the L1 and L2 caches don't match up m4 pro and m5 pro
- deleted 15d ago[deleted]
- 5555watch 15d agoWould be interesting to see Speedometer 3.1 tests as well. I find they translate really well to user experience, and previously the M5 Base was beating the equivalent Ryzen/Intel there as well.