Apple M3 Ultra benchmark seen on Geekbench — beats M4 Max in multi-core, but not single-core

Apple just launched a new generation of the Mac Studio, which is now powered by either an M4 Max or M3 Ultra chip. Both versions are now up for pre-order, but they won’t start shipping until March 12.
Despite that, it seems that one benchmark result has appeared on Geekbench, as shared by X user @jimmyjames_tech, and the numbers seem quite impressive. According to the Geekbench 6.4.0 for macOS AArch64 test, the Mac running an Apple M3 Ultra chip equipped with 256 GB of memory hit a single-core score of 3,221 and a multi-core score of 27,749. Treat the scores with some skepticism for now.

The single-core score is not as impressive, especially as the newer Apple M4 chips could hit higher scores. The top-end M4 Max hit 3,925 points in single-core, with even the entry-level M4 attached to an iMac beat the M3 Ultra with a score of 3,699. That is to be expected, of course, especially given that the Apple M4 has a higher frequency.

However, the M3 Ultra blows away the competition in multi-core operation with its massive 32-core CPU with up to 24 performance cores. It beat the M4 Max’s 25,647 score by about 2,102 points in the multi-core test on Geekbench, giving it a performance uplift of around 8% over the newer-generation chip.

The M3 Ultra is bound to defeat the M4 Max in multi-core performance, especially as it’s the equivalent of two M3 Max chips connected together via an interposer. Apple did not announce an M4 Ultra SoC, but developing these two-in-one chips takes time. The company usually launches the top-end version some time after the arrival of the base variant. Furthermore, Apple said that not every Apple Silicon generation will get an Ultra variant, although it hasn’t skipped one yet. So, only time will tell if we’ll get an M4 Ultra chip.

The new Mac Studio is set to be made publicly available from March 12, and in the days after we will see a slew of benchmarks appear. Right now these numbers seem to track with Apple’s announcements. But, if you want to be sure that the new Mac Studios are worth upgrading to, you should wait a few days for before making an informed purchase.