The power of the Apple M2 Ultra processor compared with competitors from AMD and Intel

In the Geekbench 5 benchmark compared the performance of Apple's flagship M2 Ultra processor, which will power the new Mac Pro and Mac Studio, with current competitors from AMD and Intel. And the score was not in favor of the Cupertino product.

In tests, it couldn't beat the Intel Core i9-13900K in single-threaded mode and even fell behind in multi-core workloads.

AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro W5995X and Intel Xeon W9-3495X turned out to be close analogues of the M2 Ultra, and even then with a stretch. It easily outperformed them in single-threaded tests, but still ran significantly slower when more cores were needed.

However, it is worth remembering that Geekbench 5 does not always reflect the real capabilities of the chip. It gives only a rough idea of ​​​​power without taking into account accelerators.

The Apple M2 Ultra consists of two M2 Max systems-on-a-chip that were designed primarily for the MacBook Pro and Mac Studio computers. It can offer up to 24 CPU cores, making the chip 30% faster than the M1 Ultra.

Apple made a special bet on a GPU with 76 cores - in comparison with the previous solution, the graphics performance of the platform increased by almost 50%.

Losing in Geekbench 5 is just synthetic. We are waiting for real tests of new computers in work tasks, for example, video decoding.