Updated | Apple M2 Max and M2 Pro become PassMark's laptop CPU single-thread top dogs but Raptor Lake-HX is yet to strike

Update January 29: The 12-core variant of the Apple M2 Pro has also turned up on PassMark, with the chip managing a single-thread score of 4,174 - enough to put it in third position with the top four places now all taken by the M2 generation of Apple silicon.

Original story:

Apple is sitting pretty at the moment in PassMark’s CPU Mark chart for single-thread performance in laptops, with the M2 Max, M2 Pro (10-core), and M2 occupying the first three places. Even the M1 generation is still looking strong, with the M1 Max, 10-core M1 Pro, and 8-core M1 Pro taking up eight, ninth, and 10th position, respectively. Separating the two Apple-M families are four Alder Lake mobile processors from Intel, with three of those being powerful -HX chips. While the current situation looks good for Apple, it seems likely that Raptor Lake-HX will shake things up upon its arrival on PassMark.

For the time being, the Apple M2 Max (12 cores, 3.7 GHz) is the mobile processor single-thread top dog on a score of 4,322 points. The 10-core variant of the M2 Pro (3.5 GHz) also scores well, with 4,233 points, and there is still a 12-core version of the M2 Pro to be tested yet. Although Apple has promoted the excellent GPU performance of these new chips, it seems the CPU parts found in the new MacBook Pro 14 (2023) and MacBook Pro 16 (2023) also deliver. The score for the M2 Max is +12.32% more than the M1 Max and the result for the 10-core M2 Pro is +10.61 more than the M1 Pro with 10 cores.

But this triumphant reign for Apple probably won’t last long as Intel’s beastly Raptor Lake-HX mobile processors should appear on the same benchmark soon. The Core i9 parts, the i9-13900HX, i9-13950HX, and i9-13980HX should be the main challengers, with a couple of the Core i7 chips likely also squaring off at Apple’s M2 generation. However, it certainly is worth mentioning that these -HX speedsters will most likely turn up in big and beefy gaming laptops with plenty of space for cooling, while Apple has to cope with making sure that the new MacBook Pro 14 and MacBook Pro 16 are as slim and light as previous iterations. With this in mind, along with the power usage differences, the M2 Max and M2 Pro benchmark performances are not to be sneezed at.

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