Summary
- M5 posts record single-core Geekbench 4,263, outpacing prior M4 Max and top PC chips.
- Multi-core 17,862: ~20% boost over M4, beats M3 Pro but trails M4 Pro/Max for heavy workloads.
- Single, unconfirmed Geekbench entry—promising leap, but treat results with a grain of salt.
Apple just unveiled the next generation of M-series chips, which will power the new MacBook Pro as well as the latest generation of the iPad Pro. And it’s pretty good. So good, in fact, that it appears to even outperform Apple’s very best chips from last generation.
An early, unconfirmed benchmark result for Apple’s next-generation M5 SoC has popped up online. The result, uploaded to the Geekbench 6 database, appears to be from the new 14-inch MacBook Pro and shows that the M5 has achieved the highest single-core score ever recorded for any Mac or PC processor on the platform.
According to the single benchmark entry, the M5 chip clocked a single-core score of 4,263. Not only is this the best base M-series chip to date, but if this is true, it would also outperform even the Pro and Max variants of the M4. The previous top-performing Mac chip, the M4 Max in the 16-inch MacBook Pro, scored 3,914, while the top-end PC processor listed, AMD’s Ryzen 9950X3D, comes in at 3,399. The M5’s score represents a roughly 9% increase over the M4 Max and a staggering 25% lead over the high-performance AMD chip in this specific test. It’s an important leap.
As a reminder, while multi-core capabilities are essential for heavy, parallelized workloads like video rendering or code compilation, single-core speed often dictates how quickly applications launch and how snappy the system feels during everyday tasks like web browsing and document editing. It says a lot about what Apple is doing with these chips, and means the MacBook Pro might actually be a decent leap (depending on your usage, of course) even if you’ve been eyeing models with Pro or Max CPUs.
The leaked data specifies that the M5 chip in this 14-inch MacBook Pro model features a 10-core CPU, configured with four high-performance cores and six high-efficiency cores. The single-core benchmark isolates the performance of just one of these powerful performance cores.
Multi-core is still decent, but here’s where we find our usual differences. The 14-inch MacBook Pro achieved a multi-core score of 17,862. This represents a performance uplift of up to 20% compared to the M4 chip in the equivalent previous-generation model, which scored 14,726. Perhaps more notably, this score allows the standard M5 chip to outperform the previous-generation M3 Pro chip (15,257). It doesn’t yet hold a candle to the M4 Pro and the M4 Max, and those are more appropriate if you need multi-core performance. We should get M5 Pro and M5 Max chips eventually as well, but for now, this is pretty good nonetheless.
You should take this with a grain of salt. The figures are based on a single, unconfirmed benchmark upload to a public database. But if this is true, it’s at least promising.
Source: MacRumors