New benchmarks may prove Apple’s claim the M3 is 20% more powerful than the M2
After Apple the M3 chip and a variety of M3-powered Mac devices during the ‘Scary Fast’ eventincluding two MacBook Pro models and the iMac, the obvious question was: how much more powerful is the M3 than the M2?
Apple said during its keynote that M3 silicon is about 20% faster than the M2 and according to a new report from BGRthat number appears to be holding up thanks to recently leaked benchmark results. Geekbench test results show that the base M3 chip has a single-core score of about 3,000, while the multi-core score is about 11,700. Compare that to the M2, which achieved 2,570 and 9,600 scores for single-core and multi-core, respectively.
While we’re not sure which Mac device was used to test the M3 silicon, it was most likely the 14-inch M3 MacBook Pro, as Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman previously said the then-rumored “Mac 15.3” model was a MacBook Pro and closest to the currently confirmed 14-inch model (the 15.3 was originally thought to be a 13-inch model).
If more benchmark leaks are revealed for the M3 iMac 24-inch, the results would most likely be an even bigger improvement without the limitations of portable power management. The scores for the M3 Max and M3 Pro chips should be even higher regardless of the device tested.
The M3 seems to be shaping up into something truly impressive
Seeing these benchmark results makes me happy how impressive the M3 silicon is already, and we don’t yet have full tests and reviews for the Mac devices powered by the M3 chips.
Previously I had written about what these new chips would be like change Mac gaming forever, based on Apple’s claims. Now that we have an early test showing as much as a 20% performance increase between the M3 and M2, the facts already seem to support these claims.
It will be interesting to see how much better the base M3 chip performs in a full range of gaming benchmark tests with a variety of devices, as well as the M3 Max and Pro versions. It will also be fascinating to know how well the raw performance boost stacks up with the various other features that should be built into the M3 silicon, such as dynamic caching, hardware-accelerated ray tracing, and mesh shading. Not to mention that Apple’s SoC takes the place of a discrete graphics card option and could even surpass Apple’s last discrete option, using AMD cards, in terms of performance, which sounds pretty unreal.