Apple’s M5 Is Almost As Fast As A Workstation-Class M1 Ultra; Less Than 5% Slower In Multi-Core Performance With Half The Number Of CPU Cores

Three years ago, Apple unveiled its first high-end chipset, the M1 Ultra, signaling to Intel and AMD that they were not the only players in town for ultra-performance computing. Slowly, the Cupertino firm has been working its way to introduce more powerful and efficient Apple Silicon, and the M5 is the company’s first example of how far its progression has come. Found in the latest MacBook Pro and iPad Pro, it is impressive that the new SoC is just a hairline slower than the M1 Ultra in Geekbench 6’s multi-core benchmark while sporting half the number of cores.

In single-core performance, the M5 obliterates the M1 Ultra and achieves the highest score for any chip for this benchmark category

To recap, the M1 Ultra has a 20-core CPU, which is divided into 16 performance cores and four efficiency cores, with the highest frequency being 3.22GHz. The M5, on the other hand, has only 10 CPU cores, with six performance and four efficiency ones. Also, a previous Geekbench 6 comparison shows that not all M5 chipsets are made equally, with the version found in the iPad Pro operating at a slower 4.43GHz speed.

The one in the MacBook Pro runs at a higher 4.61GHz, and this is the version that we will compare against the M1 Ultra. Right off the bat, we spot that there is hardly a major difference in the multi-core score, with less than a 5 percent delta. Assuming someone bold enough like Geekerwan decides to resort to extreme cooling measures for the M5 MacBook Pro, we could see those differences shrink even further.

M5

• Single-core score - 4,263 (178.6 percent faster than the M1 Ultra)
• Multi-core score - 17,862 (4.9 percent slower than the M1 Ultra)

M1 Ultra

• Single-core score - 2,387
• Multi-core score - 18,792

What is also interesting to note is that the M5 has 50 percent higher L2 cache than the M1 Ultra at 6MB. It appears that Apple did not bother to increase the cache count until this generation because in an early specifications breakdown between the M5 iPad Pro and M4 iPad Pro, the previous-generation tablet also sports 4MB of L2 cache.

Coming to the single-core scores, the M5 is now the fastest chipset in this category and is miles ahead of the M1 Ultra, obtaining a 178.6 percent higher result thanks to the improved architecture and increased clock speeds. We are confident that when the M5 Pro and M5 Max arrive next year, these two could set new multi-core records.

News Source: Geekbench 6

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