The Apple M2 Ultra is the latest processor to power Apple’s range of Mac products including the Mac Studio, Mac Pro, and 15-inch MacBook Air. Mac devices are often aimed at professional users for tasks such as video, audio, and image editing. As such applications are usually custom tailored to their processors and optimized for their strengths. That being said, synthetic benchmarks do not always tell the whole story of what a processor, or system, is truly capable of in real-world workload scenarios. As much of a step forward for Mac users as the Apple M2 Ultra may be over its predecessor a recent Geekbench post shows it still has a long way to go in terms of traditional multicore tasks, or at least benchmarks. User @VadimYuryev posted the following on social media.
M2 Ultra Geekbench scores have leaked. One thing to keep in mind, it's GB5 and not Geekbench 6, so the scores will be much lower on v6.
— Vadim Yuryev (@VadimYuryev) June 9, 2023
Example:
M1 Ultra on GB5: 23,686
But GB6: 17,551
M2 Ultra GB5: 27,954, so it's 18% faster
GB6 should be 20,710
Link: https://t.co/36BBXtCqVK pic.twitter.com/1CEIGSYBRU
Tom’s Hardware dug up the scores for AMD’s and Intel’s premium workstation/server CPUs, the Ryzen Threadripper Pro 5995WX and Xeon W9-3495X for comparison. Unfortunately, for multicore tasks, the M2 Ultra came up far short of these two competitors. So much so its scores were roughly half on average, except for the multicore Crypto where it gained a lead. However, it took the lead in single-core comparisons, except ironically losing its Crypto lead for the same single-core test. The Intel Core i9-13900K was also included in the comparisons where it too bested the M2 Ultra in nearly every test, except again for the aforementioned multicore Crypto but also multicore Float.
Geebench Scores:
| M2 Ultra | Xeon W9-3495X | Ryzen Threadripper Pro 5995WX | Core i9-13900K | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| General specifications | 24C/24T, up to 3.68 GHz | 56C/112T, 1.90 GHz – 4.60 GHz, 105MB L3 | 64C/128T, 2.70 GHz – 4.50 GHz, 256MB L3 | 8P+16E/32T, 3.0 GHz – 5.80 GHz, 68MB L2+L3 cache |
| Single-Core | Integer | 1793 | 1522 | 1316 | 2016 |
| Single-Core | Float | 2149 | 1815 | 1719 | 2464 |
| Single-Core | Crypto | 2912 | 3926 | 3832 | 5860 |
| Single-Core | Score | 1956 | 1730 | 1563 | 2343 |
| Multi-Core | Integer | 24532 | 59183 | 46049 | 28379 |
| Multi-Core | Float | 32195 | 55393 | 49414 | 31320 |
| Multi-Core | Crypto | 46817 | 36466 | 44987 | 22280 |
| Multi-Core | Score | 27945 | 56910 | 47005 | 28956 |
In the end, though, comparing Apple silicon to others is similar to most Apple product comparisons in that it is like comparing Apples to oranges. Apple goes to great lengths to distinguish its products from others in various segments and in doing so purposely designs them differently so straight across comparisons do not always equate to real-world experiences of their users. However, when it comes to bragging rights the numbers do speak for themselves.