Apple M2 Ultra Processor Power Compared to AMD and Intel Competitors

No, this is not the new king.

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

In tests, it could not surpass the Intel Core i9-13900K in single-threaded mode and even lagged behind in multi-core workloads.

Close analogs to the M2 Ultra turned out to be the AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro W5995X and Intel Xeon W9-3495X, albeit with some reservations. It easily outperformed them in single-threaded tests, but still operated significantly slower when more cores were needed.

However, it is worth noting that Geekbench 5 does not always reflect the real capabilities of the chip. It provides only a rough idea of performance without accounting for accelerators.

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

Apple placed a special emphasis on the GPU with 76 cores - compared to the previous solution, the platform's graphics performance has increased by nearly 50%.

The loss in Geekbench 5 is just synthetic. We await real tests of the new computers in practical tasks, such as video decoding.