According to geekbench 7800x3d is 2400 single core, 15500 multicore. M4 pro is 3350 single core and 24750 multicore. Yet when I convert video using libsvtav1 with ffmpeg I’m getting noticeably faster performance on the desktop. And that’s with mbp, which doesn’t thermally throttle within 15 seconds.
Is it the 96mb cache? Avx-512? Are benchmarks bullshit when comparing different architectures?
Zen 4 isn't 512 bits wide though, it's a split cycle 256 bit wide SIMD engine otherwise very similar (except in register size) to M6's.
The answer is more that Geekbench is at this point[1] heavily tuned to exactly the code Apple silicon does well: implicitly parallel wide-issue scalar code that you typically get out of modern compilers and JIT engines when throwing mostly-unoptimized "regular source code" at them. Apple has an enormous amount of instruction issue parallelism compared with x86.
The grandparent is looking at transcoding tasks where the limit isn't instruction issue but actual compute hardware on the core. And Apple doesn't actually win by much there.
It's just hard to know what to measure. Geekbench tends to be a metric for "feels fast doing boring interactive user stuff", which probably matches Apple's marketing imperatives well.
[1] Really they keep moving harder in that direction with every release. The "cooling pauses" in v6 likewise seemed very much like an attempt to boost the score on fanless Apple devices. If one were the type to allege a dark conspiracy, this is a tempting spot.
Probably AVX-512. AFAIK Apple CPUs are still using ARM NEON instructions with 128-wide SIMD registers. I guess they are banking on you using the GPU if you want to parallelize those kinds of workload.
Which version of svt-av1 are you using? Neon optimisations were added quite recently in svt-av1, and are still a bit incomplete, so it might make a difference.
I think software with a strong focus on SIMD really favours x86 over Apple, since AVX2 support was pretty uniform and AVX-512 (except Intel's fiasco) has been supported for a while, while the post-NEON landscape is strange in ARM country.
There's also the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme, 3,438 points in single-core and 27,519 points in multi-core, which I think was the record when it was released a year ago.
I guess they'll release an X3 in six months. So it's interesting to see the race is now between Apple and Qualcomm, both on Arm, with Intel and AMD getting left behind, at least on this benchmark.
I think it's neither, it all comes down to peace of mind and that's the true future of technology.
In the past it was more of a race of companies trying to get "there" first, not anymore, we live in an interesting age where people feel constantly controlled and everyone is exhausted about tech in general.
Linux gives you that middle finger peace of mind like saying "I will never be controlled anymore and ever again" ..funny there is a big Warez article on the HN homepage at the same time of this discussion, that's exactly what it feels like to finally come out on the other side legally.
People took decades to finally being liberated from Windows and Microsoft and many like me will never be controlled that way again and while I respect Apple more than Microsoft for a lot of things in the end it's just another corporation that wants to greedily take your life energy and precious time and enslave you again.
They are creating the best hardware at the worst possible time, but it's good for competition so it's all good.
I'll gladly sell my soul first thing every morning in exchange for a laptop that lasts longer than two hours on battery, wifi/audio/webcam work after waking from sleep, and don't need to learn a complexity fractal of CLI commands to do basic things with my computer.
Personally it's the software which doesn't make me buy one. The hardware really is one of the best you can buy but using the software makes me lose my hair.
The software identifies the hardware, performs the benchmarks, and sends the heading and results to the Geekbench DB. Somebody who had the machine at hand must have run it.
Internal leaks, these happen frequently. Employees have access to these devices for months prior to launch. Someone ran a benchmark and uploaded it on a machine they weren't supposed to.
I find that hard to believe at Apple. Not even possible that it’s accidental. They have their own internal tools, all packets leaving the network will be interrogated, leaking data is a sackable offence… if it’s in the geekbench database then it’s there because they put it there.
> Not even possible that it’s accidental. They have their own internal tools, all packets leaving the network will be interrogated, leaking data is a sackable offence
This is a story that folks like to tell, but it's not really how things work - at least since they stopped letting Steve Jobs lock all his engineers in the conference venue.
Leaks are a sackable offence at every tech firm, deep packet inspection firewalls are used all over the place, information leaks like this still happen pretty much every single product cycle.
Jokes aside yeah I'm definitely in need of a ram upgrade. Or I have to learn how to close Firefox tabs.
But with a few docker containers, android studio running an emulator + vscode and a ton of Claude code / Pi / Codex instances, I'm basically maxed out all the time now.
I use about:processes to stop processes that eat up too much memory over time. The tabs stay open but get unloaded. YouTube especially acts like a black hole for memory if you let it.
No, not the same. Those are review samples who got sent the product early. Those "leaks" happen AFTER the products have been officially announced by Apple.
Leaked prior to announcement - Leaked Benchmarks Confirm M2 Chip is Up to 20% Faster Than M1 https://www.macrumors.com/2022/06/15/m2-geekbench-benchmark/
Date of article: June 15, 2022 10:32 am PDT. M2 announcement was June 6.[0]
I don't feel like doing it for your other sources. They follow the same pattern. You can check official announcement dates vs "leaked" dates yourself.
That was a mistake and I updated it - only the M2 Max benchmarks leaked prior to announcement, not the M2.
Those M2 Max Geekbench benchmarks appeared on November 30, 2022. Apple announced the Apple M2 Max chip on January 17, 2023.
Similarly, those M4 Geekbench benchmarks for Mac were leaked on October 6, 2024, prior to Apple announcing the product. Apple announced the M4 Macs on October 28, 2024.
I noticed a whiff of panic at the iphone 18 launch. Opened macrumors and there like 6 articles in a row about preordering the phone, how soon you can get the phone when you preorder, how long the queues are etc.
Guess they didn't get the expected # of preorders.
I will never understand how an intelligent, opinionated crowd like HN can be so obsessed over Apple's CPU offerings. Buying into the Mac ecosystem is without a doubt subjecting oneself to vendor lock-in. Linux won't even run on these machines until in 2-3 years, if you're lucky.
No driver problems (well, first party ones at least), good performance and I can still run any software I like.
I do prefer and run Linux on my desktop, and could complain about Apple and Mac OS all day. The level of polish is very inconsistent. But despite everything it's still not as user hostile as Windows got nowadays.
"Linux won't even run on these machines until in 2-3 years, if you're lucky"
I have yet to buy a Windows machine where Linux works perfectly with no issues whatsoever. My most compatible machine to date needed a USB-C ethernet adapter to get a network connection for more than 10 minutes at a time.
So ironically old M series Macs might not be the worst choice given Asahi doesn't need to target every hardware configuration of the last couple decades.
I'm currently in the middle of porting a game from 2004 to run on MacOS via wine. On a 5000$ Macbook Pro, I'm getting about 4 FPS. This has multiple causes, including the game being single threaded and running through Rosetta, but damn is it hard to get good single core performance out of Macbooks.
Out of curiosity, I also ported the game to arm Linux with fex + upstreamed the wine patches in about a third the time and there's no FPS issues
Did you forget to tell Claude to make it run fast?
(I am not joking. I did a port of an old utility, Dos Navigator, and I gave Claude+Codex a set of KPIs: cold start under 100ms, 30MB RAW image preview under 50ms, and a few others. I went to bed, and I woke up to a file manager written in Swift that is a joy to use, its so fast, esp. when previewing images. If I haven't requested it, it would likely be way slower).
Running something with "Wine" doesn't usually mean "porting", "porting" means making a native binary that doesn't run through an emulation layer.
Anyway, probably you are trying to run a 32-bit executable with Rosetta, that won't be fast, because Rosetta was never meant to run 32-bit things and has got a lot of pitfalls.
If anything it's the exact opposite. They're ridiculously powerful with more memory bandwidth than pretty much any equivalent PC. It is easy to make sloppy software because you can get away with so much.
Something is going horribly wrong. I don't know what it is (without your code I don't know), have you profiled where it's going wrong? There's no way a game for 2004 would be that slow.
If you want help, I've done some similar work, you could pop it up on a github repo or something. What is the game?
What porting you talking about exactly? Packaging existing binaries? Compiling source code making it more compatible with Wine?
In my experience as game developer and porting C++ code tells such difference usually mean there are something really wrong with syncronization primitives. So 99.99% of the time code does nothing just waiting for something to unlock.
I recommend you try giving your AI an open ended task like, "it's at 4 fps even though it's a 22 year old game and the raw hardware performance is many orders of magnitude higher. Maybe due to running under Wine and Rosetta. Please figure out the simplest way you can unlock usable performance (30-60 FPS) short of decompiling, reverse engineering, and reimplementing the full game yourself natively. Maybe there is something else you can figure out for the performance unlock. The hardware is definitely there, so there has to be a way. The game is running so make sure you don't break it. Keep the same game behavior."
Regardless of which AI you're using, it will be able to figure something out in a few hours. 2004 pc's were 500-800 mhz, 128 MB RAM, and if they had a GPU at all it was 16-32 MB, 0.2-1 GLOP.
Your AI should be able to figure out a way to get it running in realtime.
M5 Ultra CPU:
https://browser.geekbench.com/search?k=parkdale_cpu&q=mac17%...
M5 Ultra GPU:
https://browser.geekbench.com/search?k=grand_gpu&q=mac17%2C1...
Base M6 CPU:
https://browser.geekbench.com/search?k=parkdale_cpu&q=mac18%...
Base M6 GPU:
https://browser.geekbench.com/search?k=grand_gpu&q=mac18%2C5
The Base M6 CPU single core is averaging a bit over 4000 on Geekbench 7.
For comparison, the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 averages 3161 on the same test.
https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/amd-ryzen-9-9950x3d...
The Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus averages 2940 on the same test.
https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/intel-core-ultra-7-...
According to geekbench 7800x3d is 2400 single core, 15500 multicore. M4 pro is 3350 single core and 24750 multicore. Yet when I convert video using libsvtav1 with ffmpeg I’m getting noticeably faster performance on the desktop. And that’s with mbp, which doesn’t thermally throttle within 15 seconds.
Is it the 96mb cache? Avx-512? Are benchmarks bullshit when comparing different architectures?
Apple chips don't have AVX-512.
They do have media engines (that don't support AV1 encode), so if you switch to H.265, it will pull way ahead.
Zen 4 isn't 512 bits wide though, it's a split cycle 256 bit wide SIMD engine otherwise very similar (except in register size) to M6's.
The answer is more that Geekbench is at this point[1] heavily tuned to exactly the code Apple silicon does well: implicitly parallel wide-issue scalar code that you typically get out of modern compilers and JIT engines when throwing mostly-unoptimized "regular source code" at them. Apple has an enormous amount of instruction issue parallelism compared with x86.
The grandparent is looking at transcoding tasks where the limit isn't instruction issue but actual compute hardware on the core. And Apple doesn't actually win by much there.
It's just hard to know what to measure. Geekbench tends to be a metric for "feels fast doing boring interactive user stuff", which probably matches Apple's marketing imperatives well.
[1] Really they keep moving harder in that direction with every release. The "cooling pauses" in v6 likewise seemed very much like an attempt to boost the score on fanless Apple devices. If one were the type to allege a dark conspiracy, this is a tempting spot.
From what I've been able to gather, Apple only supports SME and the small "streaming" part of SVE2 required by SME since the M4. Which seems to be mostly useless for video encoding (I only see NEON/SVE in https://gitlab.com/AOMediaCodec/SVT-AV1/-/tree/master/Source... or https://github.com/Multicorewareinc/x265/tree/master/source/...) it's basically a GEMM engine.
So basically, video encoding is a bad show for Apple who seem to be saying "use crappy hardware encoding and buy amd64 if you need more".
Very hard to find benchmark data. Found https://openbenchmarking.org/vs/Processor/Apple+M4+Pro,AMD+R... that shows a good x265 performance at 1080p but not 4K. Guess the wider SIMD units matter more there.
Apple has dedicated hardware for video decode and encode for several video formats.
That's why the comparisons between PCs and Macs running video editing software favor the Macs so heavily.
Bingo, each CPU is too unique with its own strengths and weaknesses to make broad statements, marketing picks up what they like and ignore rest
I guess they'll release an X3 in six months. So it's interesting to see the race is now between Apple and Qualcomm, both on Arm, with Intel and AMD getting left behind, at least on this benchmark.
https://signal65.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Signal65-Ins...
https://browser.geekbench.com/v7/cpu/singlecore
here are the leaderboards for anyone else who was curious
Linux is actually exciting contrary to Apple as a company, their hardware, their prices and macOS in general.
And I’m saying this as a Windows user too, I will NEVER buy a Mac but I’ve used Linux on and off for 30+ years.
For the past 5-10 years Linux has been the only excitement I’ve had personally.
In the past it was more of a race of companies trying to get "there" first, not anymore, we live in an interesting age where people feel constantly controlled and everyone is exhausted about tech in general.
Linux gives you that middle finger peace of mind like saying "I will never be controlled anymore and ever again" ..funny there is a big Warez article on the HN homepage at the same time of this discussion, that's exactly what it feels like to finally come out on the other side legally.
People took decades to finally being liberated from Windows and Microsoft and many like me will never be controlled that way again and while I respect Apple more than Microsoft for a lot of things in the end it's just another corporation that wants to greedily take your life energy and precious time and enslave you again.
They are creating the best hardware at the worst possible time, but it's good for competition so it's all good.
https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide...
~10% is a good guess. AI tools run much better on Ubuntu/Fedora out of the box, and that is not exactly a secret either.
And Windows is not remotely dead yet. Gamers are not selling their PCs and getting Macs.
Been hearing both for the same time.
The software identifies the hardware, performs the benchmarks, and sends the heading and results to the Geekbench DB. Somebody who had the machine at hand must have run it.
The M7 generation has updated the tensor instructions in the GPU cores and they want to ship that ASAP.
I would love to see macOS replacing Windows in virtual desktop environments.
This is a story that folks like to tell, but it's not really how things work - at least since they stopped letting Steve Jobs lock all his engineers in the conference venue.
Leaks are a sackable offence at every tech firm, deep packet inspection firewalls are used all over the place, information leaks like this still happen pretty much every single product cycle.
Not to mention that Apple has a huge number of teams, and no absolute standards across them. People would be shocked at the things Apple DOESN'T do.
Then again, with the current state of their QA, I think it's becoming clear what Apple doesn't do much of anymore.
Where does the myth of Apple come from? You should go on blind and ask someone that works there the reality lolol
So this is different and faster than such a result in the old scoring would have implied.
AMD beats Intel, but only by a couple hundred points.
Qualcomm beats them both.
It feels like a crime upgrading from this thing tbh.
But with a few docker containers, android studio running an emulator + vscode and a ton of Claude code / Pi / Codex instances, I'm basically maxed out all the time now.
I use about:processes to stop processes that eat up too much memory over time. The tabs stay open but get unloaded. YouTube especially acts like a black hole for memory if you let it.
In the current times performance/price seems to be increasingly important.
(Not to mention several other factors that once did not even exist, or were irrelevant.)
This is actually the M6 Pro and not the M6. It has 18 CPU cores to the M6's 12. The scores line up as well.
Reports have said all along that Apple is skipping M6 Pro/Max to focus on M7 generation.
I can't remember the last time an Apple chip got leaked like this.
Apple has not mentioned M6 Pro anywhere.
Leaked prior to launch - Leaked Benchmarks Confirm M2 Chip is Up to 20% Faster Than M1 https://www.macrumors.com/2022/06/15/m2-geekbench-benchmark/
Leaked prior to announcement - 'M2 Max' Geekbench Scores Leak Online, Revealing Rumored Specs and Performance https://www.macrumors.com/2022/11/30/m2-max-chip-geekbench-r...
Leaked prior to launch - M3 Max Chip Around as Fast as M2 Ultra in Early Benchmark Results https://www.macrumors.com/2023/11/01/m3-max-chip-benchmark-r...
Leaked prior to announcement - Mac M4 Chip Performance Unveiled in First Benchmarks https://www.macrumors.com/2024/10/07/m4-mac-chip-benchmarks/
Leaked prior to launch - M5 Chip Achieves Impressive Feat in 14-Inch MacBook Pro Speed Test https://www.macrumors.com/2025/10/17/m5-chip-macbook-pro-gee...
Leaked prior to launch - Apple's M5 Max Chip Achieves a New Record in First Benchmark Result
https://www.macrumors.com/2026/03/05/m5-max-geekbench-benchm...
Then add this one to the list.
I don't feel like doing it for your other sources. They follow the same pattern. You can check official announcement dates vs "leaked" dates yourself.
[0]https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2022/06/apple-unveils-m2-with...
Those M2 Max Geekbench benchmarks appeared on November 30, 2022. Apple announced the Apple M2 Max chip on January 17, 2023.
Similarly, those M4 Geekbench benchmarks for Mac were leaked on October 6, 2024, prior to Apple announcing the product. Apple announced the M4 Macs on October 28, 2024.
Guess they didn't get the expected # of preorders.
I do prefer and run Linux on my desktop, and could complain about Apple and Mac OS all day. The level of polish is very inconsistent. But despite everything it's still not as user hostile as Windows got nowadays.
"Linux won't even run on these machines until in 2-3 years, if you're lucky"
I have yet to buy a Windows machine where Linux works perfectly with no issues whatsoever. My most compatible machine to date needed a USB-C ethernet adapter to get a network connection for more than 10 minutes at a time. So ironically old M series Macs might not be the worst choice given Asahi doesn't need to target every hardware configuration of the last couple decades.
Change how you like your day to day workflows in terms of window management
Share a home made app with some friends without helping them install it
Fix a bug in the vendors software by writing a patch
People care about performance.
Out of curiosity, I also ported the game to arm Linux with fex + upstreamed the wine patches in about a third the time and there's no FPS issues
(I am not joking. I did a port of an old utility, Dos Navigator, and I gave Claude+Codex a set of KPIs: cold start under 100ms, 30MB RAW image preview under 50ms, and a few others. I went to bed, and I woke up to a file manager written in Swift that is a joy to use, its so fast, esp. when previewing images. If I haven't requested it, it would likely be way slower).
Anyway, probably you are trying to run a 32-bit executable with Rosetta, that won't be fast, because Rosetta was never meant to run 32-bit things and has got a lot of pitfalls.
For me it's like they built a Ferrari with 4 thin bicycle tires. What a waste.
If you want help, I've done some similar work, you could pop it up on a github repo or something. What is the game?
In my experience as game developer and porting C++ code tells such difference usually mean there are something really wrong with syncronization primitives. So 99.99% of the time code does nothing just waiting for something to unlock.
I recommend you try giving your AI an open ended task like, "it's at 4 fps even though it's a 22 year old game and the raw hardware performance is many orders of magnitude higher. Maybe due to running under Wine and Rosetta. Please figure out the simplest way you can unlock usable performance (30-60 FPS) short of decompiling, reverse engineering, and reimplementing the full game yourself natively. Maybe there is something else you can figure out for the performance unlock. The hardware is definitely there, so there has to be a way. The game is running so make sure you don't break it. Keep the same game behavior."
Regardless of which AI you're using, it will be able to figure something out in a few hours. 2004 pc's were 500-800 mhz, 128 MB RAM, and if they had a GPU at all it was 16-32 MB, 0.2-1 GLOP.
Your AI should be able to figure out a way to get it running in realtime.