Apple M1 Ultra appears to be a multi-core beast as it rivals the 64-core AMD Threadripper 3990X in leaked benchmarks

Apple has announced its top-of-the-line M1 Ultra SoC for the upcoming Mac Studio at an event held on 8 March 2022. Apple M1 Ultra packs in 20 CPU cores, up to 64 GPU cores, and an astounding 800 GB/s memory bandwidth. Cupertino claims that the M1 Ultra will offer better performance than an anonymous 16-core desktop CPU while consuming 100 W less.

While we won’t know which desktop processor Apple was referring to during the event until the chip becomes available, leaked Geekbench 5 benchmark scores for the M1 Ultra appear to give us a relative idea about the chip’s performance. Remember to take these numbers with a grain of salt.

According to the Geekbench entry, M1 Ultra has a single-core score of 1793 and a multi-core score of 24055. As a comparison, Intel Core i9-12900K managed a single-core score of 1997 and a multi-threaded score of 17204. More interestingly, M1 Ultra’s multi-threaded performance with only 20 cores is dangerously close to 64-core AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X’s multi-threaded performance numbers of 25133.

If this multi-threaded score is true, M1 Ultra is a monumental achievement when it comes to performance per watt as Apple rates the chip as a 60 W part. As a comparison, Threadripper 3990X has a TDP of 280 W.

Buy 2021 Apple MacBook Pro on Amazon