Apple this week announced a new generation of Mac Studio, and surprisingly it is available with two different chip families: M3 Ultra and M4 Max. While the company claims that the M3 Ultra is up to twice as fast as the M4 Max in some workloads, benchmark tests show that there isn’t a huge difference between the CPU of the two chips.
M3 Ultra is not that much faster than M4 Max when it comes to CPU
A recent Geekbench 6 test run on the new Mac Studio equipped with the high-end version of the M3 Ultra chip gives us an idea of what to expect from the most powerful chip ever designed by Apple. With a 32-core CPU, M3 Ultra scored 3221 in single-core and 27749 in multi-core. While the numbers are impressive, they’re not exactly much higher than the score obtained by the M4 Max chip in the Geekbench test.
For comparison, the high-end version of the M4 Max chip with a 16-core CPU scored 3921 in single-core and 25650 in multi-core. This means that the M4 Max has faster CPU cores than the M3 Ultra, although the Ultra chip wins in the multi-core comparison by a difference of just 8%.
Of course, there’s a lot to keep in mind when it comes to these tests. First, it’s worth noting that the M3 series of chips is based on the first generation of the 3 nanometer architecture (the same as the A17 Pro chip) made by TSMC, which is less efficient than the second generation introduced with the M4 and A18 chips. This is probably why the M3 Ultra has a lower single-core performance than the M4 Max.
Secondly, this test only measures CPU performance. While the M4 Max chip can only be configured with a GPU of up to 40 cores, the M3 Ultra is available with a GPU of up to 80 cores. It’s very likely that the difference in performance will be enormous when it comes to graphics-intensive tasks. The M3 Ultra also has higher memory bandwidth (800GB/s vs. 500GB/s).
Breaking: M3 Ultra benchmarks have leaked, confirming that it’s now the world’s FASTEST production CPU.
Scores are a bit low because of old M3 core tech and diminishing returns with more cores, thanks to how the multi-core update works with Geekbench 6. https://t.co/WWoSiQ7zWD
— Vadim Yuryev (@VadimYuryev) March 7, 2025
What does all this mean for customers? Users who need a fast computer for tasks that don’t rely so heavily on the GPU can buy the M4 Max Mac Studio (which starts at $1,999) and still get CPU performance similar to that of the more expensive M3 Ultra version, which starts at $3,999.
As for why Apple chose to launch an M3 Ultra chip instead of the M4 Ultra, some believe that Apple is saving the Ultra variant of the M4 series for a new generation of the Mac Pro, to further differentiate it from the Mac Studio.
The new Mac Studio is now available for pre-order with the official launch set for March 12.
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