Apple is done unveiling its initial M4 series, which includes the M4 Max. This only means that the M4 Ultra remains and will most likely be announced next year when the company announces the Mac Pro, but there is no word if an updated Mac Studio will be unveiled alongside it. We have already reported about the estimated graphics performance of the chipset, where a content creator calculated that the 80-core GPU of the M4 Ultra beats the desktop version of NVIDIA’s RTX 4090 across both OpenCL and Vulkan APIs, even if it is just a single benchmark.
Now, we get our first look at the estimated multi-core figures of Apple’s upcoming workstation SoC, and it effortlessly beats AMD’s Ryzen 9950X while cementing a healthy lead against the M4 Max.
Compared to the M4 Pro, the M4 Ultra is 81 percent faster while also obtaining a massive performance difference against Intel’s 24-core Ultra 9 285K
It was previously estimated that the M4 Ultra’s top-end configuration would offer a 32-core CPU and an 80-core GPU, but the number of performance and efficiency cores were not mentioned in the earlier update. Regardless, Vadim Yuryev, who handles the YouTube channel Max Tech, has shared what he believes are the Geekbench 6 multi-core results if the chipset was tested using the benchmark right now. According to his estimations, the M4 Ultra obtains a whopping 40,012 points in this category, making it 94.7 percent faster than the 16-core Ryzen 9 9950X and 73.8 percent faster than the 24-core Ultra 9 285K.
Then again, we already expected the M4 Ultra to make easy work of the aforementioned desktop processors, because the M4 Max had already beaten both of them in a previous multi-core comparison. Given that Apple’s most powerful M4 Max configuration is kitted out with a 16-core CPU with 12 performance and four efficiency cores, along with a 40-core GPU, does it mean that the M4 Ultra with double the cores will also secure double the score? Not quite, because these chipsets do not scale as well if core counts are increased, which might explain why Apple likes to limit these specifications, as it would unnecessarily increase power draw.
In case you want to know the performance difference between the M4 lineup, the M4 Ultra is estimated to be 50 percent faster than the M4 Max in the same Geekbench 6 multi-core test, while being 81.3 percent faster than the M4 Pro. While these figures are thoroughly impressive, we want to remind readers that at the end of the day, these are just estimates, and the scores that we take a gander at right now could be vastly different from the results that come forth next year, so remember to treat these numbers with a truckload of salt.