3 ms·

There 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/

There 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 7d ago
I 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 7d 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 7d ago
  Which 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.
- snek_case 7d ago
  Probably AVX-512. AFAIK Apple CPUs are still using ARM NEON instructions with 128-wide SIMD registers. I guess they are banking on you using the GPU if you want to parallelize those kinds of workload.
- GeekyBear 7d ago
  Remember all those years when people claimed Apple chips were "cheating" on benchmarks because they had crypto instructions that x86 lacked? Apple chips don't have AVX-512. They do have media engines (that don't support AV1 encode), so if you switch to H.265, it will pull way ahead.
  - ajross 7d ago
    > Apple chips don't have AVX-512. Zen 4 isn't 512 bits wide though, it's a split cycle 256 bit wide SIMD engine otherwise very similar (except in register size) to M6's. The answer is more that Geekbench is at this point[1] heavily tuned to exactly the code Apple silicon does well: implicitly parallel wide-issue scalar code that you typically get out of modern compilers and JIT engines when throwing mostly-unoptimized "regular source code" at them. Apple has an enormous amount of instruction issue parallelism compared with x86. The grandparent is looking at transcoding tasks where the limit isn't instruction issue but actual compute hardware on the core. And Apple doesn't actually win by much there. It's just hard to know what to measure. Geekbench tends to be a metric for "feels fast doing boring interactive user stuff", which probably matches Apple's marketing imperatives well. [1] Really they keep moving harder in that direction with every release. The "cooling pauses" in v6 likewise seemed very much like an attempt to boost the score on fanless Apple devices. If one were the type to allege a dark conspiracy, this is a tempting spot.
    - thejazzman 7d ago
      I would expect cooling pauses to have the opposite effect. The MacBook Air/neo are the only ones without fans. Even the Studio Display has a fan
      - ajross 7d ago
        The cooling pause thing was just a dig at Geekbench, not specific to this discussion (thus putting it in a footnote). They tuned (the last version of their) benchmark specifically to give better numbers on hardware that tends to throttle under performance load. Now... you can make a reasonable case that this matches real world interactive load better. But it also happens to have the practical effect of making Apple's numbers better, and no one else's. The new benchmarks are measuring subtly different things, and the new thing they measure happens to be what Apple wants to sell. At best, that's backwards.
- luxuryballs 7d ago
  sounds like it's the software
- BoingBoomTschak 7d ago
  I think software with a strong focus on SIMD really favours x86 over Apple, since AVX2 support was pretty uniform and AVX-512 (except Intel's fiasco) has been supported for a while, while the post-NEON landscape is strange in ARM country. From what I've been able to gather, Apple only supports SME and the small "streaming" part of SVE2 required by SME since the M4. Which seems to be mostly useless for video encoding (I only see NEON/SVE in https://gitlab.com/AOMediaCodec/SVT-AV1/-/tree/master/Source/Lib https://gitlab.com/AOMediaCodec/SVT-AV1/-/tree/master/Source... or https://github.com/Multicorewareinc/x265/tree/master/source/common https://github.com/Multicorewareinc/x265/tree/master/source/...) it's basically a GEMM engine. So basically, video encoding is a bad show for Apple who seem to be saying "use crappy hardware encoding and buy amd64 if you need more". Very hard to find benchmark data. Found https://openbenchmarking.org/vs/Processor/Apple+M4+Pro,AMD+Ryzen+9+9900X+12-Core https://openbenchmarking.org/vs/Processor/Apple+M4+Pro,AMD+R... that shows a good x265 performance at 1080p but not 4K. Guess the wider SIMD units matter more there.
  - GeekyBear 7d ago
    > So basically, video encoding is bad show for Apple Apple has dedicated hardware for video decode and encode for several video formats. That's why the comparisons between PCs and Macs running video editing software favor the Macs so heavily.
    - BoingBoomTschak 7d ago
      HW and SW encoding are not comparable with regard to quality (for the same size, obviously) though. That's kinda what I meant with my quip.
      - GeekyBear 7d ago
        Nothing prevents a vendor from implementing a high quality hardware encoder, just as nothing prevents the creation of a low quality software encoder. Video editing is an area that Apple dominates because PCs become a laggy mess on complicated high resolution edits. AMD has started to copy the same strategy with the recent Ryzen AI chips. They include hardware video encode/decode units as well as unified memory.
- tom_ 7d ago
  Judging by my PCs (M4 Max Mac Studio; 2990WX desktop PC), Geekbench might flatter the Apple chips for multicore a bit I think: Geekbench 7 results: * AMD 2990WX: 1384 (single), 13052 (multi) (https://browser.geekbench.com/v7/cpu/181239 https://browser.geekbench.com/v7/cpu/181239) * Apple M4 Max: 3552 (single), 29863 (multi) (https://browser.geekbench.com/v7/cpu/390256 https://browser.geekbench.com/v7/cpu/390256) For parallelisable stuff that can occupy all cores for an extended period, the 2990WX typically takes about ~1.2x as long to do the same work/does ~0.83x the work per unit time, assuming code compiled with clang or gcc. Which isn't really coming across in the numbers here. CPUMark is a bit better: * AMD 2990WX: 2282 (single), 32040 (multi) (https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+Ryzen+Threadripper+2990WX&id=3309 https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+Ryzen+Threadrip...) * Apple M4 Max: 4590 (single), 43911 (multi) (https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Apple+M4+Max+16+Core&id=6348 https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Apple+M4+Max+16+Cor...) I haven't spent much time timing single core stuff, except - regarding clang, which looks like it contributes to the Geekbench 7 score, I did some measurements a few months ago suggesting that clang compiles for x64 more slowly than for ARM, all else being as equal as I could be bothered to try to make it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46938682 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46938682 - and the single threaded test runs I did of my code suggest that the Geekbench 7 single core might be about right? (Whether the clang timing discrepancy is actually relevant to Geekbench, I've no idea, but I thought it interesting anyway.) If you need a benchmark that makes the PC look massively faster than the Mac, I'm sure those are available too.
  - bob1029 7d ago
    > If you need a benchmark that makes the PC look massively faster than the Mac, I'm sure those are available too. Go check out blender CPU scores if you need any reassurance that AMD still makes some kind of sense. https://opendata.blender.org/benchmarks/query/?compute_type=CPU&blender_version=3.1.0&group_by=device_name https://opendata.blender.org/benchmarks/query/?compute_type=...
  - jltsiren 6d ago
    Geekbench multi-core has been a single-task benchmark since version 6. The multi-core / single-core score ratio is supposed to tell how much you will benefit on the average when you use all available CPU cores. Some tasks parallelize better, while others have bottlenecks that prevent effective parallelization. For every CPU, the ratio is well below the nominal speedup you can get under ideal circumstances.
- ksec 7d ago
  Just want to add apart from all the other comments. SVT was brought by Intel and spent years to make it extremely well tuned for x86. While not the same for ARM and not even for Apple. Another point is that the multicore part uses all core including E-Core. On AMD the multicore are all the same. Meaning for some benchmarks this will flavour Apple more. Again there is nothing that stop people from optimising it for ARM Mac. The problem is the usage of it is so small it probably doesn't make sense to focus on it. SVT took a really long time for it to reach quality parity with AOM's AV1 encoder and later exceed it.
- TiredOfLife 7d ago
  Fast video encode was how AMD fans were coping during bulldozer era
esperent 7d ago
There's also the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme, 3,438 points in single-core and 27,519 points in multi-core, which I think was the record when it was released a year ago. I guess they'll release an X3 in six months. So it's interesting to see the race is now between Apple and Qualcomm, both on Arm, with Intel and AMD getting left behind, at least on this benchmark. https://signal65.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Signal65-Insights_Qualcomm-Snapdragon-X2-Elite-Extreme-Performance-1.pdf https://signal65.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Signal65-Ins...
- GeekyBear 7d ago
  Samsung's chips use high end ARM stock cores, and are also ahead of Intel and AMD.
  - TiredOfLife 7d ago
    Which ones?
ksec 7d ago
I know these are all Mac CPU, but for context people may want to look at A20 Pro [1], which in 2 years time will be in MacBook Neo. Pretty damn impressive if you ask me. A20 Pro is around 4K on Geekbench 7. And the P-Core is not the same as M6. The A20 Pro is actually only 9 wide compared to 10-wide on M6. Supposedly more power efficient and smaller die size. [1] https://browser.geekbench.com/search?q=iPhone19%2C2 https://browser.geekbench.com/search?q=iPhone19%2C2
- deleted 7d ago
  [deleted]

revolvingthrow 7d ago

I 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 7d 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 7d ago
Which 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.
snek_case 7d ago
Probably AVX-512. AFAIK Apple CPUs are still using ARM NEON instructions with 128-wide SIMD registers. I guess they are banking on you using the GPU if you want to parallelize those kinds of workload.
GeekyBear 7d ago
Remember all those years when people claimed Apple chips were "cheating" on benchmarks because they had crypto instructions that x86 lacked? Apple chips don't have AVX-512. They do have media engines (that don't support AV1 encode), so if you switch to H.265, it will pull way ahead.
- ajross 7d ago
  > Apple chips don't have AVX-512. Zen 4 isn't 512 bits wide though, it's a split cycle 256 bit wide SIMD engine otherwise very similar (except in register size) to M6's. The answer is more that Geekbench is at this point[1] heavily tuned to exactly the code Apple silicon does well: implicitly parallel wide-issue scalar code that you typically get out of modern compilers and JIT engines when throwing mostly-unoptimized "regular source code" at them. Apple has an enormous amount of instruction issue parallelism compared with x86. The grandparent is looking at transcoding tasks where the limit isn't instruction issue but actual compute hardware on the core. And Apple doesn't actually win by much there. It's just hard to know what to measure. Geekbench tends to be a metric for "feels fast doing boring interactive user stuff", which probably matches Apple's marketing imperatives well. [1] Really they keep moving harder in that direction with every release. The "cooling pauses" in v6 likewise seemed very much like an attempt to boost the score on fanless Apple devices. If one were the type to allege a dark conspiracy, this is a tempting spot.
  - thejazzman 7d ago
    I would expect cooling pauses to have the opposite effect. The MacBook Air/neo are the only ones without fans. Even the Studio Display has a fan
    - ajross 7d ago
      The cooling pause thing was just a dig at Geekbench, not specific to this discussion (thus putting it in a footnote). They tuned (the last version of their) benchmark specifically to give better numbers on hardware that tends to throttle under performance load. Now... you can make a reasonable case that this matches real world interactive load better. But it also happens to have the practical effect of making Apple's numbers better, and no one else's. The new benchmarks are measuring subtly different things, and the new thing they measure happens to be what Apple wants to sell. At best, that's backwards.
luxuryballs 7d ago
sounds like it's the software
BoingBoomTschak 7d ago
I think software with a strong focus on SIMD really favours x86 over Apple, since AVX2 support was pretty uniform and AVX-512 (except Intel's fiasco) has been supported for a while, while the post-NEON landscape is strange in ARM country. From what I've been able to gather, Apple only supports SME and the small "streaming" part of SVE2 required by SME since the M4. Which seems to be mostly useless for video encoding (I only see NEON/SVE in https://gitlab.com/AOMediaCodec/SVT-AV1/-/tree/master/Source/Lib https://gitlab.com/AOMediaCodec/SVT-AV1/-/tree/master/Source... or https://github.com/Multicorewareinc/x265/tree/master/source/common https://github.com/Multicorewareinc/x265/tree/master/source/...) it's basically a GEMM engine. So basically, video encoding is a bad show for Apple who seem to be saying "use crappy hardware encoding and buy amd64 if you need more". Very hard to find benchmark data. Found https://openbenchmarking.org/vs/Processor/Apple+M4+Pro,AMD+Ryzen+9+9900X+12-Core https://openbenchmarking.org/vs/Processor/Apple+M4+Pro,AMD+R... that shows a good x265 performance at 1080p but not 4K. Guess the wider SIMD units matter more there.
- GeekyBear 7d ago
  > So basically, video encoding is bad show for Apple Apple has dedicated hardware for video decode and encode for several video formats. That's why the comparisons between PCs and Macs running video editing software favor the Macs so heavily.
  - BoingBoomTschak 7d ago
    HW and SW encoding are not comparable with regard to quality (for the same size, obviously) though. That's kinda what I meant with my quip.
    - GeekyBear 7d ago
      Nothing prevents a vendor from implementing a high quality hardware encoder, just as nothing prevents the creation of a low quality software encoder. Video editing is an area that Apple dominates because PCs become a laggy mess on complicated high resolution edits. AMD has started to copy the same strategy with the recent Ryzen AI chips. They include hardware video encode/decode units as well as unified memory.
tom_ 7d ago
Judging by my PCs (M4 Max Mac Studio; 2990WX desktop PC), Geekbench might flatter the Apple chips for multicore a bit I think: Geekbench 7 results: * AMD 2990WX: 1384 (single), 13052 (multi) (https://browser.geekbench.com/v7/cpu/181239 https://browser.geekbench.com/v7/cpu/181239) * Apple M4 Max: 3552 (single), 29863 (multi) (https://browser.geekbench.com/v7/cpu/390256 https://browser.geekbench.com/v7/cpu/390256) For parallelisable stuff that can occupy all cores for an extended period, the 2990WX typically takes about ~1.2x as long to do the same work/does ~0.83x the work per unit time, assuming code compiled with clang or gcc. Which isn't really coming across in the numbers here. CPUMark is a bit better: * AMD 2990WX: 2282 (single), 32040 (multi) (https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+Ryzen+Threadripper+2990WX&id=3309 https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+Ryzen+Threadrip...) * Apple M4 Max: 4590 (single), 43911 (multi) (https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Apple+M4+Max+16+Core&id=6348 https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Apple+M4+Max+16+Cor...) I haven't spent much time timing single core stuff, except - regarding clang, which looks like it contributes to the Geekbench 7 score, I did some measurements a few months ago suggesting that clang compiles for x64 more slowly than for ARM, all else being as equal as I could be bothered to try to make it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46938682 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46938682 - and the single threaded test runs I did of my code suggest that the Geekbench 7 single core might be about right? (Whether the clang timing discrepancy is actually relevant to Geekbench, I've no idea, but I thought it interesting anyway.) If you need a benchmark that makes the PC look massively faster than the Mac, I'm sure those are available too.
- bob1029 7d ago
  > If you need a benchmark that makes the PC look massively faster than the Mac, I'm sure those are available too. Go check out blender CPU scores if you need any reassurance that AMD still makes some kind of sense. https://opendata.blender.org/benchmarks/query/?compute_type=CPU&blender_version=3.1.0&group_by=device_name https://opendata.blender.org/benchmarks/query/?compute_type=...
- jltsiren 6d ago
  Geekbench multi-core has been a single-task benchmark since version 6. The multi-core / single-core score ratio is supposed to tell how much you will benefit on the average when you use all available CPU cores. Some tasks parallelize better, while others have bottlenecks that prevent effective parallelization. For every CPU, the ratio is well below the nominal speedup you can get under ideal circumstances.
ksec 7d ago
Just want to add apart from all the other comments. SVT was brought by Intel and spent years to make it extremely well tuned for x86. While not the same for ARM and not even for Apple. Another point is that the multicore part uses all core including E-Core. On AMD the multicore are all the same. Meaning for some benchmarks this will flavour Apple more. Again there is nothing that stop people from optimising it for ARM Mac. The problem is the usage of it is so small it probably doesn't make sense to focus on it. SVT took a really long time for it to reach quality parity with AOM's AV1 encoder and later exceed it.
TiredOfLife 7d ago
Fast video encode was how AMD fans were coping during bulldozer era

esperent 7d ago

There's also the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme, 3,438 points in single-core and 27,519 points in multi-core, which I think was the record when it was released a year ago. I guess they'll release an X3 in six months. So it's interesting to see the race is now between Apple and Qualcomm, both on Arm, with Intel and AMD getting left behind, at least on this benchmark. https://signal65.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Signal65-Insights_Qualcomm-Snapdragon-X2-Elite-Extreme-Performance-1.pdf https://signal65.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Signal65-Ins...

GeekyBear 7d ago
Samsung's chips use high end ARM stock cores, and are also ahead of Intel and AMD.
- TiredOfLife 7d ago
  Which ones?

ksec 7d ago

I know these are all Mac CPU, but for context people may want to look at A20 Pro [1], which in 2 years time will be in MacBook Neo. Pretty damn impressive if you ask me. A20 Pro is around 4K on Geekbench 7. And the P-Core is not the same as M6. The A20 Pro is actually only 9 wide compared to 10-wide on M6. Supposedly more power efficient and smaller die size. [1] https://browser.geekbench.com/search?q=iPhone19%2C2 https://browser.geekbench.com/search?q=iPhone19%2C2

deleted 7d ago
[deleted]