M3 Ultra vs. M4 Max: Which is better? Benchmarks can't tell either
Apple surprised us with its announcement of the new Mac Studio this week, and confused us with its chip choices — the M4 Max and the M3 Ultra. It's hard enough to tell which chip is more powerful just from their names, but according to early benchmarks, it's also hard to tell from their CPU performance.
While the M3 Ultra does come out on top (just as Apple claims), the difference doesn't appear to be as significant as promised. On a Geekbench 6 test posted by Vadim Yuryev, the M3 Ultra Mac Studio scored 3221 in single-core and 27749 in multi-core — and just to be clear, these are very big numbers. Yuryev calls it the 'world's fastest production CPU.' However, benchmarks for the M4 Max are not far behind at 3921 in single-core and 25647 in multi-core. This means the individual cores on the M4 Max are actually faster, and the M3 Ultra only wins in multi-core performance by 8%.
For comparison, Apple says that the M3 Ultra 'delivers nearly 2x faster performance than M4 Max in workloads that take advantage of high CPU and GPU core counts.' That claim is not in line with what we're seeing from these first benchmarks — though we will start to see different results as more people get their hands on the M3 Ultra for testing.
The M4 Max's superior single-core performance isn't a huge surprise — the M4 family of chips is based on second-generation 3 nanometer architecture, which is more efficient than the first-gen tech in the M3 chips. The tests will also start to look very different once GPUs are thrown into the mix, largely because the M4 Max can only go up to a 40-core GPU while the M3 Ultra is available with 80 cores.
However future benchmarks turn out, these CPU numbers should be useful for potential buyers who aren't interested in GPU-heavy use cases since it means they can buy the M4 Max configuration without losing out on performance.
If you're wondering about where the M4 Ultra is, some sources did expect to see it in the Mac Studio — but just because it's not here, doesn't mean it's not coming. We may still get an M4 Ultra in the Mac Pro which is rumored to be on its way in the second half of this year.
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