M5 Chip Achieves Impressive Feat in 14-Inch MacBook Pro Speed Test

The first alleged benchmark result for the M5 chip in the new 14-inch MacBook Pro has surfaced, allowing for some performance comparisons.

Based on a single unconfirmed result uploaded to the Geekbench 6 database today, the M5 chip has pulled off an impressive feat. Specifically, the chip achieved a score of 4,263 for single-core CPU performance, which is the highest single-core score that has ever been recorded in the Geekbench 6 database for any Mac or PC processor.

In the 14-inch MacBook Pro, the M5 chip has a 10-core CPU, with four performance cores and six efficiency cores. The single-core score on Geekbench 6 refers to the performance achieved by just one of the performance cores, whereas the multi-core score refers to the maximum performance achieved by all 10 of the CPU cores combined.

A chip's multi-core score reflects the maximum CPU performance for multi-threaded tasks, but single-core performance remains important for certain games and apps, and it plays a key role in overall system responsiveness and snappiness.

The top five single-core scores for Mac and PC processors in the Geekbench 6 database:

• M5 (14-inch MacBook Pro): 4,263
• M4 Max (16-inch MacBook Pro): 3,914
• M4 Pro (16-inch MacBook Pro): 3,871
• M4 (Mac mini): 3,784
• AMD Ryzen 9950X3D: 3,399

Unsurprisingly, the M5 chip in the new iPad Pro achieved a similar single-core score of 4,175, based on Geekbench 6 results available so far.

As for multi-core performance, the M5 chip in the 14-inch MacBook Pro achieved a score of 17,862 in the single result, which makes it up to 20% faster than the M4 chip in the previous-generation 14-inch MacBook Pro. The standard M5 chip is faster than the M3 Pro chip, and nearly on par with the M1 Ultra chip.

A selection of multi-core scores for Mac chips:

• M4 Max (16-inch MacBook Pro): 25,645
• M1 Ultra (Mac Studio): 18,405
• M5 (14-inch MacBook Pro): 17,862
• M3 Pro (14-inch MacBook Pro): 15,257
• M4 (14-inch MacBook Pro): 14,726

The new 14-inch MacBook Pro is available to pre-order now, and it launches on Wednesday.

Higher-end 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models with M5 Pro and M5 Max chips are rumored to launch in early 2026, but the regular M5 chip is clearly no slouch.