The first benchmark results for the standard M3 chip surfaced in the Geekbench 6 database today, providing a closer look at the chip's CPU performance improvements.
Based on the results so far, the M3 chip has single-core and multi-core scores of around 3,000 and 11,700, respectively. The standard M2 chip has single-core and multi-core scores of around 2,600 and 9,700, respectively, so the M3 chip is up to 20% faster than the M2 chip, as Apple claimed during its "Scary Fast" event on Monday.
Geekbench 6 multi-core scores:
M3 chip: ~11,700 (+20% vs. M2 chip)
M2 chip: ~9,700 (+17% vs. M1 chip)
M1 chip: ~8,315
It's unclear if the results are for the new 14-inch MacBook Pro or iMac, both of which are available with the standard M3 chip, but performance should be similar for both machines. The results have a "Mac15,3" identifier, which Bloomberg's Mark Gurman previously reported was for a laptop with the same display resolution as a 14-inch MacBook Pro.
The standard M3 chip is equipped with an 8-core CPU and up to a 10-core GPU, and it supports up to 24GB of unified memory. The chip has improved GPU architecture with support for hardware-accelerated ray tracing and mesh shading, which will make high-end games look more realistic. It also has a 16-core Neural Engine for AI.
We have yet to see any Geekbench results for the higher-end M3 Pro and M3 Max chips available in most new 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models.
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Kinda pointless comparing performance 13 years apart. I'm pretty sure that your 2010 Mac Pro has a much larger performance gap compared to a 1997 PowerMac.
So the base M3 is six times faster in single core and four times faster in multi core than my current Mac Pro, while consuming a tenth or less of the electricity.
Just for reference this is only slightly slower in single core performance than the most powerful Intel chip, slightly more powerful than the most speced out intel Mac Pro from late 2019 in both single and multi core, and going by this, the Pro and Max will definitely be more powerful than say, another ARM based chip that is coming out in the middle of next year.
