Apple officially has a new king of its silicon hill with the M3 Ultra processor. The M3 Ultra is the company's most powerful creation yet. Given that it powers the all-new Apple Mac Studio, it's probably out to steal the show. It represents a significant leap. Let’s delve into the details and examine early benchmarks to see what this chip can really do.
For a moment, the M4 Max crowned itself the performance king of Apple. Now, the M3 Ultra has shown up to prove otherwise. The M3 Ultra marks its territory. It packs up to 32 CPU cores with an eye-watering 80 graphics cores, and support for up to 512GB of unified memory with 819 GB/s of bandwidth. On paper, the M3 Ultra looks impressive. But do benchmarks support the hype?
The Tale of Geekbench 6 Scores
Geekbench 6 early results are beginning to tell a story. The Mac Studio with M3 Ultra scored 27,749 multi-core. That’s a strong figure. It also just edges out the 16-core M4 Max which posted about 25,913 in the same test. That puts multi-core performance for the M3 Ultra up about 7%. This is a significant uptick.
The Single-Core Surprise: M4 Max Stays Ahead
The performance narrative shifts when considering single-core performance. Here, the M4 Max emerges ahead, scoring 4054 compared to the 3221 for the M3 Ultra. The M4 Max exhibits about 25% better single-core performance. This is a more meaningful difference. Single core tasks could still offer a performance advantage for the M4 Max.
The Bigger Picture: Memory and Bandwidth Count
While Geekbench scores provide some insight with synthetic workloads, more needs to be considered. The M3 Ultra’s real strength could be its mammoth memory capacity and bandwidth. Built for memory-intensive workloads, the M3 Ultra supports up to 512GB of unified memory against 128GB for the M4 Max. It also has considerably higher memory bandwidth (819 GB/s vs. 546 GB/s). Consider serious video editing, complex 3D rendering, or handling giant datasets. That’s where the M3 Ultra will excel.
Real-World Impact: Yet to Be Seen?
The first Geekbench scores indicate that the M3 Ultra is unquestionably faster at multi-core workloads and has better memory. However, the single-core gap is notable. Whether this translates to a huge real-world performance boost for everyone remains to be seen. The M3 Ultra's increased memory and bandwidth are likely to be a big advantage for users of demanding applications, solidifying its position as Apple's most powerful processor yet.
