Apple Has Leaked the First Performance Test of the Apple M2 Max Chip!
Or is it a form of marketing?!
It’s no secret that next year we’ll see the unveiling of a new generation of high-end Apple Silicon chips in the form of the Apple M2 Pro and M2 Max. And thanks to a freshly leaked performance test that appeared in the Geekbench 5 database, we know roughly how powerful the latter chipset should be.
However, compared to the previous generation, it’s not an outright terror. In the Geekbench 5 tests, which are sovereignly the most used benchmark tools, the M2 Max chip scored 1889 points per single core, and the multi-core test scored 14586 points.
It can therefore be expected to perform roughly in these values (+- lower hundreds of points). Just for the record, the M1 Max scores around 1700 points in the same single-core test, while its multi-core score is around 12,200 points.
So it is definitely not a giant leap, although it will not be negligible either, and users who need the highest performance will appreciate even this seemingly small increase. However, the benchmark did not reveal “only” the performance of the machine but also the number of its CPU cores or clock speed.
We should expect 12 CPU cores and a clock speed of 3.54 GHz. The number of cores is quite interesting, as the basic M1 Max has “only” 10 CPU cores, while the higher configuration has 20 cores. We can therefore expect to choose from either 12 or 24 CPU cores for the M2 Max.
Additionally, it seems that there will be a brand new RAM option, as the benchmark machine was tested with 96GB of RAM, a value that you won’t currently configure in a Mac with the M1 Max. So it’s definitely something to look forward to.
Comparison with the current M1 Max
If we look at this comparison, at first glance, we can see the already mentioned difference in the number of cores. Another difference is in the frequency at which the processor itself ticks. Here, we will have an extra 300MHz as with the basic M2 chip.
I do not count anything exactly on Hz, but some of that extra performance will be there, and we should feel it, especially with a multi-core load. Therefore, in Geekbe 5, I made a comparison with a 16" MacBook Pro that has the M1 Max along with 32GB of Ram.
Single core performance
With the newer version of the M2 Max scoring 1889 in single-core performance the older model only scored 1764 in this benchmark, so there is an 8% increase in performance. However, if we consider the average of the tests in the benchmark, the performance increase will only be 7.1%, even that is a respectable figure.
Multi-core performance
Here we come to a 14.2% increase in performance. This, considering the presence of 2 extra cores and higher CPU frequency, is not that much. Just the increase due to frequency alone should be noticeable, say around 8–9%, so the overall performance increase in multi-threaded load seems to me to be somehow small, considering the increase in the number of cores.
I would almost say that the two new cores either were not used in the test or it is an expansion of the number of power-saving cores that would not make sense to me personally. I would expect more of a provisional unpreparedness of the benchmark, and we will see the real results only when the new Apple Hardware is released, but we have something to look forward to.
My evaluation
Based on the data in Geekbench 5, we can see that the new M2 Max won’t be a head-scratcher. We don’t yet know the distribution of performance and power cores, but I would expect something like 10 to 2.
From my point of view, it will be an interesting chipset, although I would reach for the 64GB ram max myself, 96 is overkill even for me, although one never knows :). At least we definitely have something to look forward to.
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