The M4 Pro might be Apple’s champion in delivering an exceptional ‘price to performance’ ratio for the company’s newest Mac releases, but the M4 Max is for the absolute ballers that want the ‘no nonsense’ computing capabilities to bulldoze any task in the chipset’s path. When talking about single-threaded applications, the latest Geekbench 6 results reveal that the M4 Max has no equal, as it is now the fastest chipset in this category. As for the multi-core category, that is another story, but keep in mind that despite limiting the number of CPU cores, the SoC performs incredibly well.
Compared to the M3 Max, the M4 Max is around 22 percent faster while maintaining the same 16-core CPU configuration
Apple did not change the maximum core configurations for the M3 Max and M4 Max, meaning that both chipsets feature a 16-core CPU with 12 performance and 4 efficiency cores for their top-tier variants. A new Geekbench 6 leak spotted by James Atkinson shows that the M4 Max obtained 4,060 points in the single-core results, making it the highest score that we have seen to date, but it was not the first to achieve this accolade.
The M4 running in Apple’s iPad Pro was previously reported to have obtained a score of 4,000, but that was with the help of liquid nitrogen. In the multi-core score, the lack of increased CPU cores means that there will not be any major difference between the M4 Max and M4 Pro, as only a 17.6 percent performance delta exists. Comparing the new Apple Silicon with the M3 Max, that lead is increased to 21.9 percent, which is not major, but thanks to the bump in clock speeds, the M4 Max achieves a higher multi-core score.
If you look closely at the Geekbench 6 leak, you will notice that the M4 Max is running at increased frequencies, with its performance running at 4.50GHz, whereas the default specification for the M4 series is 4.40GHz or 4.41GHz. It is possible that the performance cores were slightly tweaked for the ‘Pro’ and ‘Max’ versions this year, but we cannot ignore that Apple might have given more emphasis to the M4 Pro this year by equipping it with a 14-core CPU.
However, its maximum GPU core count can only go up to 20 cores, while the M4 Max can be kitted with up to 40 of them. Apple’s forte has always lied in extending its lead in single-core tests, and the company has proven yet again that the competition is playing catch-up.
News Source: Geekbench 6