Apple (AAPL) M6 Tops Geekbench Single-Core Ahead of Launch

Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) has had the first Geekbench 7 results for its M6 and M5 Ultra chips surface ahead of a 22 September launch, with the M6 posting the highest single-core score in the database and the M5 Ultra trading places with AMD workstation silicon carrying nearly three times the core count.

The M6, which debuts in the new Mac mini, scored 4,071 in single-core. That figure tops every other Mac and PC result in the Geekbench 7 database, above the M5 Max at 3,731 and Qualcomm's Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme at 3,396. It supports Apple's claim of the fastest single-threaded CPU performance available.

The M5 Ultra, a 36-core part running at a reported peak of around 4.6GHz in a Mac Studio with 256GB of unified memory, scored 3,774 single-core and 52,516 multi-core.

The multi-core comparison with Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (NASDAQ: AMD) is where care is needed. One high-end Threadripper PRO 9995WX system, a 96-core Zen 5 part, scored 50,911 in the same test, putting the M5 Ultra roughly 3% ahead. Other 9995WX submissions range from about 48,700 to 50,600. Coverage citing an 11% lead used a different baseline.

The benchmark itself limits the conclusion. Geekbench multi-thread runs are short and bursty, and many subtests scale efficiently only to roughly 8 to 32 threads, which leaves much of a 96-core processor idle. In heavily parallel tests such as Clang and ray tracing, the Threadripper led by as much as 58%.

All results are unverified single submissions. Tech Seller USA supplies AMD processors and a wider range of enterprise CPUs.