The software identifies the hardware, performs the benchmarks, and sends the heading and results to the Geekbench DB. Somebody who had the machine at hand must have run it.
Internal leaks, these happen frequently. Employees have access to these devices for months prior to launch. Someone ran a benchmark and uploaded it on a machine they weren't supposed to.
I find that hard to believe at Apple. Not even possible that it’s accidental. They have their own internal tools, all packets leaving the network will be interrogated, leaking data is a sackable offence… if it’s in the geekbench database then it’s there because they put it there.
Not even possible that it’s accidental. They have their own internal tools, all packets leaving the network will be interrogated, leaking data is a sackable offence
This is a story that folks like to tell, but it's not really how things work - at least since they stopped letting Steve Jobs lock all his engineers in the conference venue.
Leaks are a sackable offence at every tech firm, deep packet inspection firewalls are used all over the place, information leaks like this still happen pretty much every single product cycle.
No, not the same. Those are review samples who got sent the product early. Those "leaks" happen AFTER the products have been officially announced by Apple.
Leaked prior to announcement - Leaked Benchmarks Confirm M2 Chip is Up to 20% Faster Than M1 https://www.macrumors.com/2022/06/15/m2-geekbench-benchmark/
Date of article: June 15, 2022 10:32 am PDT. M2 announcement was June 6.[0]
I don't feel like doing it for your other sources. They follow the same pattern. You can check official announcement dates vs "leaked" dates yourself.
That was a mistake and I updated it - only the M2 Max benchmarks leaked prior to announcement, not the M2.
Those M2 Max Geekbench benchmarks appeared on November 30, 2022. Apple announced the Apple M2 Max chip on January 17, 2023.
Similarly, those M4 Geekbench benchmarks for Mac were leaked on October 6, 2024, prior to Apple announcing the product. Apple announced the M4 Macs on October 28, 2024.
I'm currently in the middle of porting a game from 2004 to run on MacOS via wine. On a 5000$ Macbook Pro, I'm getting about 4 FPS. This has multiple causes, including the game being single threaded and running through Rosetta, but damn is it hard to get good single core performance out of Macbooks.
Out of curiosity, I also ported the game to arm Linux with fex + upstreamed the wine patches in about a third the time and there's no FPS issues
If anything it's the exact opposite. They're ridiculously powerful with more memory bandwidth than pretty much any equivalent PC. It is easy to make sloppy software because you can get away with so much.
What porting you talking about exactly? Packaging existing binaries? Compiling source code making it more compatible with Wine?
In my experience as game developer and porting C++ code tells such difference usually mean there are something really wrong with syncronization primitives. So 99.99% of the time code does nothing just waiting for something to unlock.
Running something with "Wine" doesn't usually mean "porting", "porting" means making a native binary that doesn't run through an emulation layer.
Anyway, probably you are trying to run a 32-bit executable with Rosetta, that won't be fast, because Rosetta was never meant to run 32-bit things and has got a lot of pitfalls.
I recommend you try giving your AI an open ended task like, "it's at 4 fps even though it's a 22 year old game and the raw hardware performance is many orders of magnitude higher. Maybe due to running under Wine and Rosetta. Please figure out the simplest way you can unlock usable performance (30-60 FPS) short of decompiling, reverse engineering, and reimplementing the full game yourself natively. Maybe there is something else you can figure out for the performance unlock. The hardware is definitely there, so there has to be a way. The game is running so make sure you don't break it. Keep the same game behavior."
Regardless of which AI you're using, it will be able to figure something out in a few hours. 2004 pc's were 500-800 mhz, 128 MB RAM, and if they had a GPU at all it was 16-32 MB, 0.2-1 GLOP.
Your AI should be able to figure out a way to get it running in realtime.
Something is going horribly wrong. I don't know what it is (without your code I don't know), have you profiled where it's going wrong? There's no way a game for 2004 would be that slow.
If you want help, I've done some similar work, you could pop it up on a github repo or something. What is the game?
Did you forget to tell Claude to make it run fast?
(I am not joking. I did a port of an old utility, Dos Navigator, and I gave Claude+Codex a set of KPIs: cold start under 100ms, 30MB RAW image preview under 50ms, and a few others. I went to bed, and I woke up to a file manager written in Swift that is a joy to use, its so fast, esp. when previewing images. If I haven't requested it, it would likely be way slower).
Jokes aside yeah I'm definitely in need of a ram upgrade. Or I have to learn how to close Firefox tabs.
But with a few docker containers, android studio running an emulator + vscode and a ton of Claude code / Pi / Codex instances, I'm basically maxed out all the time now.
I use about:processes to stop processes that eat up too much memory over time. The tabs stay open but get unloaded. YouTube especially acts like a black hole for memory if you let it.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Nothing prevents a vendor from implementing a high quality hardware encoder
Uh yes, it's called reality. Advanced video coding techniques are just too complex, full of serial and branch heavy algos to work in decently sized and priced ASIC or even in GPGPU. Which is the reason none exists outside of very expensive special stuff for professional render/streaming farms.
Not even mentioning that few coding tools are shared between codecs, so while you only need 1 CPU to handle all of them, you'd need almost an ASIC per codec...
If your claim is true, you won't have any trouble finding reputable tech publications saying that the video output from Apple M series hardware is substandard in some way.
I'll wait.
I would recommend you find a floor plan for Apple's M series chips and take a look at how big Apple's media engine is.
X64 does have a stronger SIMD story, but this is partly compensated for by the fact that ARM64 is much easier to decode wide. M series has a very wide decoder and a lot of instruction level parallelism. It can turn chunks of those 128-bit SIMD operations into what amounts to wider operations.
AVX still wins though.
M series still wins on performance per watt and now apparently leads on general purpose code.
All these leading edge chips are very good. We have an embarrassment of riches when it comes to blistering fast chips here.
On what, microbenchmarks? I have realtime audio workloads where the hot loop is essentially linear algebra. Exactly the kind of work that suits AVX2/AVX512. Guess what, Apple Silicon still pulls ahead because real workloads are branchy, cache-hungry, full of dependencies and do not line up in 8 neat f64 operations per cycle.
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.
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 - 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.
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.
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.
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.
I think it's neither, it all comes down to peace of mind and that's the true future of technology.
In the past it was more of a race of companies trying to get "there" first, not anymore, we live in an interesting age where people feel constantly controlled and everyone is exhausted about tech in general.
Linux gives you that middle finger peace of mind like saying "I will never be controlled anymore and ever again" ..funny there is a big Warez article on the HN homepage at the same time of this discussion, that's exactly what it feels like to finally come out on the other side legally.
People took decades to finally being liberated from Windows and Microsoft and many like me will never be controlled that way again and while I respect Apple more than Microsoft for a lot of things in the end it's just another corporation that wants to greedily take your life energy and precious time and enslave you again.
They are creating the best hardware at the worst possible time, but it's good for competition so it's all good.
I'll gladly sell my soul first thing every morning in exchange for a laptop that lasts longer than two hours on battery, wifi/audio/webcam work after waking from sleep, and not needing to learn a complexity fractal of CLI commands to do basic things.
They are called Chromebooks. It can sometimes be difficult for some people to find that toggle switch that enables Debian, but I can assure you, no arcane CLI commands are involved.
EDIT: Any Chromebook using a Panther Lake chip, or an upcoming Googlebook ARM, can get you there.
Personally it's the software which doesn't make me buy one. The hardware really is one of the best you can buy but using the software makes me lose my hair.
Where could you possibly find a misrepresentation like that?
On the stats website you linked at any time in the last 20 years with the exception of the two most recent months. To be explicit all of the data points are closer to 3% than 10% except July and August 2026.
I don’t think it’s that surprising that the GP has a misrepresentation of Linux desktop deployments given that the uptick is recent.
Apple needs better GPUs for "AAA gaming on macOS". My M2 Max is pretty awful at games that run fine on a desktop GPU. An M(whatever) Ultra to play games seems like a debatable value proposition.
Ah, asking the real questions. The speed of a closed ecosystem CPUs such as Apple's is irrelevant. As long as Linux or BSD doesnt't run on it in a stable fashion, I'm not interested.
It's not even that Linux is that great. But Windows and MacOS user experience have degraded so much in the last decade due to user hostile decisions and lack of vision, they essentially nullify advances made on the hardware side.
POWER should be the real competitor. If only it had laptop class implementations...
I will never understand how an intelligent, opinionated crowd like HN can be so obsessed over Apple's CPU offerings. Buying into the Mac ecosystem is without a doubt subjecting oneself to vendor lock-in. Linux won't even run on these machines until in 2-3 years, if you're lucky.
Try and export a few thousand Notes entries with images.
Not a problem, I don’t use Apple Notes on my Mac.
Change how you like your day to day workflows in terms of window management
Not a problem, I can just customize my hammerspoon config to behave differently
Share a home made app with some friends without helping them install it
That depends more on what my friends are using than what I use. Me using Linux wouldn’t make it any easier if they are using Windows or macOS.
Fix a bug in the vendors software by writing a patch
Not being able to fix a bug in an OS doesn’t lock me into that OS. And there are bugs in any Linux distribution that are way too complex to fix even if theoretically possible. So it doesn’t make any difference.
A MacBook is pretty much locked to macOS even if it’s theoretically possible to boot a different OS but that doesn’t make me locked into macOS. I can sell my MacBook for a very reasonable price and buy whatever I want.
The OS is mostly invisible to me. Except for the desktop manager but both Mac and Linux have options for that, I just don’t even feel the need to change the defaults. If I really need Linux for whatever reason, Docker makes that extremely easy on my Mac. I really can’t understand what Linux gives you that you would feel a need to change your OS on Mac.
No driver problems (well, first party ones at least), good performance and I can still run any software I like.
I do prefer and run Linux on my desktop, and could complain about Apple and Mac OS all day. The level of polish is very inconsistent. But despite everything it's still not as user hostile as Windows got nowadays.
"Linux won't even run on these machines until in 2-3 years, if you're lucky"
I have yet to buy a Windows machine where Linux works perfectly with no issues whatsoever. My most compatible machine to date needed a USB-C ethernet adapter to get a network connection for more than 10 minutes at a time.
So ironically old M series Macs might not be the worst choice given Asahi doesn't need to target every hardware configuration of the last couple decades.
IME intelligent people don't have difficulty understanding that different people want different things and that your computing preferences are not objectively more correct than someone else's.
Would be interesting to see Speedometer 3.1 tests as well. I find they translate really well to user experience, and previously the M5 Base was beating the equivalent Ryzen/Intel there as well.
Cool, but Apple didn't announce any M6 Pro yet, so where is this coming from?
Probably internal tests?
The software identifies the hardware, performs the benchmarks, and sends the heading and results to the Geekbench DB. Somebody who had the machine at hand must have run it.
Internal leaks, these happen frequently. Employees have access to these devices for months prior to launch. Someone ran a benchmark and uploaded it on a machine they weren't supposed to.
I find that hard to believe at Apple. Not even possible that it’s accidental. They have their own internal tools, all packets leaving the network will be interrogated, leaking data is a sackable offence… if it’s in the geekbench database then it’s there because they put it there.
This is a story that folks like to tell, but it's not really how things work - at least since they stopped letting Steve Jobs lock all his engineers in the conference venue.
Leaks are a sackable offence at every tech firm, deep packet inspection firewalls are used all over the place, information leaks like this still happen pretty much every single product cycle.
People love to tell stories about how stuff is done at Apple, which are often utter bullshit.
Not to mention that Apple has a huge number of teams, and no absolute standards across them. People would be shocked at the things Apple DOESN'T do.
Then again, with the current state of their QA, I think it's becoming clear what Apple doesn't do much of anymore.
+1 . The only case it is allowed is Apple's own marketing team.
It’s happened in the past. Like that employee who left the unreleased iPhone in a bar by accident.
The details of the Apple vs. OpenAI dispute over leaked data show their security is not quite that tight.
Where does the myth of Apple come from? You should go on blind and ask someone that works there the reality lolol
You think they need geekbench to verify how fast their chips run?
How does Geekbench even verify what CPU I'm using? Couldnt you inject forged data and add a even faster M100?
I thought they were skipping the M6 pro chips (or is that just the max and ultra?) to accelerate AI focused M7.
This was just rumors like 99% of other Apple-related news.
Speaking of rumours, Apple is reportedly developing a server box with multiple top of the line chips.
I would love to see macOS replacing Windows in virtual desktop environments.
The word was that they weren't going to ship systems with the M6 Pro, Max or Ultra.
The M7 generation has updated the tensor instructions in the GPU cores and they want to ship that ASAP.
I haven’t heard about the updated tensor instructions before - got any sources?
If they’re rushing the M7, it’s possible the M6 Pro and Max will be MacBook Ultra only. It would certainly give it quite a halo.
Wait. What?
This is actually the M6 Pro and not the M6. It has 18 CPU cores to the M6's 12. The scores line up as well.
Reports have said all along that Apple is skipping M6 Pro/Max to focus on M7 generation.
I can't remember the last time an Apple chip got leaked like this.
These have leaked pretty much every single year for the M-series chips, a few weeks before launch. Occasionally for the A-series.
No, not the same. Those are review samples who got sent the product early. Those "leaks" happen AFTER the products have been officially announced by Apple.
Apple has not mentioned M6 Pro anywhere.
Not accurate, both leak very frequently.
Leaked prior to launch - Leaked Benchmarks Confirm M2 Chip is Up to 20% Faster Than M1 https://www.macrumors.com/2022/06/15/m2-geekbench-benchmark/
Leaked prior to announcement - 'M2 Max' Geekbench Scores Leak Online, Revealing Rumored Specs and Performance https://www.macrumors.com/2022/11/30/m2-max-chip-geekbench-r...
Leaked prior to launch - M3 Max Chip Around as Fast as M2 Ultra in Early Benchmark Results https://www.macrumors.com/2023/11/01/m3-max-chip-benchmark-r...
Leaked prior to announcement - Mac M4 Chip Performance Unveiled in First Benchmarks https://www.macrumors.com/2024/10/07/m4-mac-chip-benchmarks/
Leaked prior to launch - M5 Chip Achieves Impressive Feat in 14-Inch MacBook Pro Speed Test https://www.macrumors.com/2025/10/17/m5-chip-macbook-pro-gee...
Leaked prior to launch - Apple's M5 Max Chip Achieves a New Record in First Benchmark Result
https://www.macrumors.com/2026/03/05/m5-max-geekbench-benchm...
Then add this one to the list.
Incorrect.
Date of article: June 15, 2022 10:32 am PDT. M2 announcement was June 6.[0]
I don't feel like doing it for your other sources. They follow the same pattern. You can check official announcement dates vs "leaked" dates yourself.
[0]https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2022/06/apple-unveils-m2-with...
That was a mistake and I updated it - only the M2 Max benchmarks leaked prior to announcement, not the M2.
Those M2 Max Geekbench benchmarks appeared on November 30, 2022. Apple announced the Apple M2 Max chip on January 17, 2023.
Similarly, those M4 Geekbench benchmarks for Mac were leaked on October 6, 2024, prior to Apple announcing the product. Apple announced the M4 Macs on October 28, 2024.
Leak'em right in the eyes!
I thought the rumours were skipping M6 for the Mac Studio. Not for Macbook Pros and Mac Minis.
And how much would it cost?
In the current times performance/price seems to be increasingly important.
(Not to mention several other factors that once did not even exist, or were irrelevant.)
I'm currently in the middle of porting a game from 2004 to run on MacOS via wine. On a 5000$ Macbook Pro, I'm getting about 4 FPS. This has multiple causes, including the game being single threaded and running through Rosetta, but damn is it hard to get good single core performance out of Macbooks.
Out of curiosity, I also ported the game to arm Linux with fex + upstreamed the wine patches in about a third the time and there's no FPS issues
If anything it's the exact opposite. They're ridiculously powerful with more memory bandwidth than pretty much any equivalent PC. It is easy to make sloppy software because you can get away with so much.
What porting you talking about exactly? Packaging existing binaries? Compiling source code making it more compatible with Wine?
In my experience as game developer and porting C++ code tells such difference usually mean there are something really wrong with syncronization primitives. So 99.99% of the time code does nothing just waiting for something to unlock.
Yep, I’ve seen issues like this before. Run it in a profiler and you’ll see it only doing useful work like 5% of the time.
Running something with "Wine" doesn't usually mean "porting", "porting" means making a native binary that doesn't run through an emulation layer.
Anyway, probably you are trying to run a 32-bit executable with Rosetta, that won't be fast, because Rosetta was never meant to run 32-bit things and has got a lot of pitfalls.
Thanks for sharing your experience.
I recommend you try giving your AI an open ended task like, "it's at 4 fps even though it's a 22 year old game and the raw hardware performance is many orders of magnitude higher. Maybe due to running under Wine and Rosetta. Please figure out the simplest way you can unlock usable performance (30-60 FPS) short of decompiling, reverse engineering, and reimplementing the full game yourself natively. Maybe there is something else you can figure out for the performance unlock. The hardware is definitely there, so there has to be a way. The game is running so make sure you don't break it. Keep the same game behavior."
Regardless of which AI you're using, it will be able to figure something out in a few hours. 2004 pc's were 500-800 mhz, 128 MB RAM, and if they had a GPU at all it was 16-32 MB, 0.2-1 GLOP.
Your AI should be able to figure out a way to get it running in realtime.
Something is going horribly wrong. I don't know what it is (without your code I don't know), have you profiled where it's going wrong? There's no way a game for 2004 would be that slow.
If you want help, I've done some similar work, you could pop it up on a github repo or something. What is the game?
Did you forget to tell Claude to make it run fast?
(I am not joking. I did a port of an old utility, Dos Navigator, and I gave Claude+Codex a set of KPIs: cold start under 100ms, 30MB RAW image preview under 50ms, and a few others. I went to bed, and I woke up to a file manager written in Swift that is a joy to use, its so fast, esp. when previewing images. If I haven't requested it, it would likely be way slower).
How much did it cost you? Or was a subscription-based usage enough?
Subscription. Translated to Around $90 in tokens.
OS/Software is why I don't like macs.
For me it's like they built a Ferrari with 4 thin bicycle tires. What a waste.
So this is different and faster than such a result in the old scoring would have implied.
It is not quite twice the score of a 6 year old Apple M1 though. And this is with much higher clock speeds (4.8 GHz vs. 3.2 GHz).
Shame, I only upgrade my M1 for chips that are at least twice as fast.
It feels like a crime upgrading from this thing tbh.
Recently I have upgraded for memory capacity.
Jokes aside yeah I'm definitely in need of a ram upgrade. Or I have to learn how to close Firefox tabs.
But with a few docker containers, android studio running an emulator + vscode and a ton of Claude code / Pi / Codex instances, I'm basically maxed out all the time now.
"Or I have to learn how to close Firefox tabs"
I use about:processes to stop processes that eat up too much memory over time. The tabs stay open but get unloaded. YouTube especially acts like a black hole for memory if you let it.
The M1 is about 1700 on Geekbench 7 single core.
For context, Intel has yet to ship a core that scores over 3000 on the same test.
AMD beats Intel, but only by a couple hundred points.
Qualcomm beats them both.
Under exactly what cooling conditions? And for how long did it sustain this speed?
There are also leaks for the M5 Ultra & Base M6.
M5 Ultra CPU:
https://browser.geekbench.com/search?k=parkdale_cpu&q=mac17%...
M5 Ultra GPU:
https://browser.geekbench.com/search?k=grand_gpu&q=mac17%2C1...
Base M6 CPU:
https://browser.geekbench.com/search?k=parkdale_cpu&q=mac18%...
Base M6 GPU:
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-9-9950x3d...
The Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus averages 2940 on the same test.
https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/intel-core-ultra-7-...
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
sounds like it's the software
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... or 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+R... that shows a good x265 performance at 1080p but not 4K. Guess the wider SIMD units matter more there.
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.
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.
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.
Uh yes, it's called reality. Advanced video coding techniques are just too complex, full of serial and branch heavy algos to work in decently sized and priced ASIC or even in GPGPU. Which is the reason none exists outside of very expensive special stuff for professional render/streaming farms.
Not even mentioning that few coding tools are shared between codecs, so while you only need 1 CPU to handle all of them, you'd need almost an ASIC per codec...
If your claim is true, you won't have any trouble finding reputable tech publications saying that the video output from Apple M series hardware is substandard in some way.
I'll wait.
I would recommend you find a floor plan for Apple's M series chips and take a look at how big Apple's media engine is.
X64 does have a stronger SIMD story, but this is partly compensated for by the fact that ARM64 is much easier to decode wide. M series has a very wide decoder and a lot of instruction level parallelism. It can turn chunks of those 128-bit SIMD operations into what amounts to wider operations.
AVX still wins though.
M series still wins on performance per watt and now apparently leads on general purpose code.
All these leading edge chips are very good. We have an embarrassment of riches when it comes to blistering fast chips here.
On what, microbenchmarks? I have realtime audio workloads where the hot loop is essentially linear algebra. Exactly the kind of work that suits AVX2/AVX512. Guess what, Apple Silicon still pulls ahead because real workloads are branchy, cache-hungry, full of dependencies and do not line up in 8 neat f64 operations per cycle.
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)
* Apple M4 Max: 3552 (single), 29863 (multi) (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+Threadrip...)
* Apple M4 Max: 4590 (single), 43911 (multi) (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 - 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.
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=...
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.
Fast video encode was how AMD fans were coping during bulldozer era
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-Ins...
Samsung's chips use high end ARM stock cores, and are also ahead of Intel and AMD.
Which ones?
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://www.cpubenchmark.net/single-thread/
https://browser.geekbench.com/v7/cpu/singlecore
here are the leaderboards for anyone else who was curious
It's insane to me that the fastest Mac chip is almost a fifth faster than the fastest Intel chip for a fraction of the power budget.
The moment AAA gaming becomes possible on macOS, the floodgates open and windows is dead
Not going to happen, Linux already won, doesn’t look like it but you’ll see.
Linux is actually exciting contrary to Apple as a company, their hardware, their prices and macOS in general.
And I’m saying this as a Windows user too, I will NEVER buy a Mac but I’ve used Linux on and off for 30+ years.
For the past 5-10 years Linux has been the only excitement I’ve had personally.
Why will you never buy a Mac even if they are making the best hardware available? Money or ideology?
Lock-in: ownership over user choice and data
I think it's neither, it all comes down to peace of mind and that's the true future of technology.
In the past it was more of a race of companies trying to get "there" first, not anymore, we live in an interesting age where people feel constantly controlled and everyone is exhausted about tech in general.
Linux gives you that middle finger peace of mind like saying "I will never be controlled anymore and ever again" ..funny there is a big Warez article on the HN homepage at the same time of this discussion, that's exactly what it feels like to finally come out on the other side legally.
People took decades to finally being liberated from Windows and Microsoft and many like me will never be controlled that way again and while I respect Apple more than Microsoft for a lot of things in the end it's just another corporation that wants to greedily take your life energy and precious time and enslave you again.
They are creating the best hardware at the worst possible time, but it's good for competition so it's all good.
I'll gladly sell my soul first thing every morning in exchange for a laptop that lasts longer than two hours on battery, wifi/audio/webcam work after waking from sleep, and not needing to learn a complexity fractal of CLI commands to do basic things.
They are called Chromebooks. It can sometimes be difficult for some people to find that toggle switch that enables Debian, but I can assure you, no arcane CLI commands are involved.
EDIT: Any Chromebook using a Panther Lake chip, or an upcoming Googlebook ARM, can get you there.
Money AND ideology - I've never owned any apple product, and never will
Personally it's the software which doesn't make me buy one. The hardware really is one of the best you can buy but using the software makes me lose my hair.
Since it doesn't run the software I need, why would I buy it? Unthinking fanboi-ism or simple stupidity?
Linux sits at <3% users or so.
Not even Microsoft believes that. Where could you possibly find a misrepresentation like that?
https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide...
~10% is a good guess. AI tools run much better on Ubuntu/Fedora out of the box, and that is not exactly a secret either.
On the stats website you linked at any time in the last 20 years with the exception of the two most recent months. To be explicit all of the data points are closer to 3% than 10% except July and August 2026.
I don’t think it’s that surprising that the GP has a misrepresentation of Linux desktop deployments given that the uptick is recent.
AI tools are the killer app driving Desktop Linux. Is anyone else still confused about this? It's been a few minutes since 2023.
Linux has been at 100% for years, don't get confused about mouse and keyboard.
AAA games already exist on Mac, and actually quite a few of them.
And Windows is not remotely dead yet. Gamers are not selling their PCs and getting Macs.
Wonder what will be first, the year of Linux desktop or the year of Apple AAA gaming ;P
Been hearing both for the same time.
Apple needs better GPUs for "AAA gaming on macOS". My M2 Max is pretty awful at games that run fine on a desktop GPU. An M(whatever) Ultra to play games seems like a debatable value proposition.
Woah the A19 Pro is 5th, that’s bonkers! It’s used in an iPhone and its power consumption is lower than chips intended for desktops.
A20 Pro would have been number 1 if it was included in that chart.
Has anyone tried to run Geekbench on POWER11 or a Telum II?
Ah, asking the real questions. The speed of a closed ecosystem CPUs such as Apple's is irrelevant. As long as Linux or BSD doesnt't run on it in a stable fashion, I'm not interested.
It's not even that Linux is that great. But Windows and MacOS user experience have degraded so much in the last decade due to user hostile decisions and lack of vision, they essentially nullify advances made on the hardware side.
POWER should be the real competitor. If only it had laptop class implementations...
What linux distro/desktop do you consider more user friendly than MacOS?
The best experience I’ve had is with Omarchy 4, but it is not appropriate for average computer users.
I will never understand how an intelligent, opinionated crowd like HN can be so obsessed over Apple's CPU offerings. Buying into the Mac ecosystem is without a doubt subjecting oneself to vendor lock-in. Linux won't even run on these machines until in 2-3 years, if you're lucky.
We love these devices, because these are the best devices overall.
I call it vendor cushion-in, all my devices are Apple and they work very well, also together.
An Nvidia GPU involves as much CUDA lock-in as Nvidia can manage, but it's also where the best performance is.
People care about performance.
that doesn't mean it's unimpressive. it's purely a software problem, really.
What kind of vendor lock in are you talking about?? I use Mac and Linux and don’t feel at all locked in by Apple.
Try and export a few thousand Notes entries with images.
Change how you like your day to day workflows in terms of window management
Share a home made app with some friends without helping them install it
Fix a bug in the vendors software by writing a patch
This doesn’t sound like vendor lock in to me, but user preferences.
Not a problem, I don’t use Apple Notes on my Mac.
Not a problem, I can just customize my hammerspoon config to behave differently
That depends more on what my friends are using than what I use. Me using Linux wouldn’t make it any easier if they are using Windows or macOS.
Not being able to fix a bug in an OS doesn’t lock me into that OS. And there are bugs in any Linux distribution that are way too complex to fix even if theoretically possible. So it doesn’t make any difference.
A MacBook is pretty much locked to macOS even if it’s theoretically possible to boot a different OS but that doesn’t make me locked into macOS. I can sell my MacBook for a very reasonable price and buy whatever I want.
Running an OS of your choice? Easily? That kind?
The OS is mostly invisible to me. Except for the desktop manager but both Mac and Linux have options for that, I just don’t even feel the need to change the defaults. If I really need Linux for whatever reason, Docker makes that extremely easy on my Mac. I really can’t understand what Linux gives you that you would feel a need to change your OS on Mac.
- Native Docker support in-kernel
- High-performance Vulkan drivers
- CUDA support (macOS doesn't sign CUDA drivers for some reason)
- Support for NTFS, FAT32 and other common filesystems without using FUSE
- Better package management with versioned rollback
- System updates that don't force breaking changes
Those are just the ones that stop me from returning to macOS (I left after Catalina).
I always thought I was missing something on the Macs. That must be it. Cheers.
No driver problems (well, first party ones at least), good performance and I can still run any software I like.
I do prefer and run Linux on my desktop, and could complain about Apple and Mac OS all day. The level of polish is very inconsistent. But despite everything it's still not as user hostile as Windows got nowadays.
"Linux won't even run on these machines until in 2-3 years, if you're lucky"
I have yet to buy a Windows machine where Linux works perfectly with no issues whatsoever. My most compatible machine to date needed a USB-C ethernet adapter to get a network connection for more than 10 minutes at a time. So ironically old M series Macs might not be the worst choice given Asahi doesn't need to target every hardware configuration of the last couple decades.
Because I like being productive and earning money
IME intelligent people don't have difficulty understanding that different people want different things and that your computing preferences are not objectively more correct than someone else's.
Sorry everyone, this submission appears to be forged—the L1 and L2 caches don't match up m4 pro and m5 pro
Would be interesting to see Speedometer 3.1 tests as well. I find they translate really well to user experience, and previously the M5 Base was beating the equivalent Ryzen/Intel there as well.