Leaked benchmark suggests Apple’s M3 Pro CPU isn’t nearly as ‘scary fast’ as M3 Max

Apple’s new M3 Pro isn’t that much faster than its predecessor, if an early (leaked) benchmark is to be believed (so be skeptical going into this story).

This comes from Vadim Yuryev from the YouTube channel Maximum technologywho tweeted (as highlighted by MacRumors) to point out a spilled benchmark of the M3 Pro (the only version of the new SoC, which has 12 cores).

The Geekbench 6 result shows that the M3 Pro – apparently in a new MacBook Pro 14-inch – achieves scores of 3,035 for single-core and 15,173 for multi-core.

Compare that to the 12-core M2 Pro variant and we see that while the M3 Pro has a good lead of 14% for single-core, in the multi-core department the new SoC is only 6% faster.

That’s not a huge difference, of course, and as a generational improvement it’s about as small as you could get away with.

While both chips are as mentioned 12-core processors, the M3 Pro clearly benefits from a new architecture and a more advanced manufacturing process (3nm), but the M2 Pro benefits from a split of 8 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores, while the M3 Pro has 6 of each type.

With a few extra performance cores, it looks like the old M2 Pro will close the gap significantly – at least in certain scenarios.

Analysis: Don’t draw conclusions yet

There are important points to take into account. First of all, this is just a leak, so as mentioned, we should be skeptical about it. Second, if true, it’s still just a single benchmark, and not necessarily representative of other results we’ll see, or even real-world performance for the M3 Pro.

Still, this is a disappointing early indication that the M3 Pro may disappoint in some respects. Especially like with the M3 Max, Apple seems to have seriously pushed the chip to be seriously fast (scarily fast, even), to be more or less on par with the M2 Ultra CPU (add salt , because these are also leaked benchmarks that we have seen for the Max).

So there’s apparently quite a big gap between the M3 Pro and the M3 Max, even more so than with the previous generation of Apple’s silicon. And as you might imagine, some people quickly used this as a possible tactic to get Mac buyers to buy M3 Max models instead of M3 Pro, boosting Apple’s profits.

It’s too early to draw such conclusions, though, and we really need to get our hands on these new laptops and do some thorough testing before we can discern the true relationship, performance-wise, between Apple’s collection of M3 chips.

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