Apple M2 Ultra makes Geekbench debut with marginal performance uplift over the M1 Ultra

Even though the Apple M2 Ultra-powered Mac Pro and Mac Studio aren't scheduled to ship until June 13, someone has already managed to get their hands on the Mac Pro and put it through Geekbench 5.4.4. It comes from an unknown source, HA-MAC-News, (via @VadimYuryev on Twitter) and should be treated with scepticism. While the listing seems legitimate, it is easy to duplicate Geekbench entries.

This particular Mac Pro variant running the M2 Ultra is tricked-out with 192 GB of RAM running a beta version of macOS 14 Sonoma. As far as the actual Apple M2 Ultra Geekbench score is concerned, the 24-core behemoth scores 1,956 and 27,945 points in the single and multi-threaded tests. That is about 10% faster than that of the M1 Ultra in single-core (1,750 average) and about the same in multi-core (25,000 average). Both M1 Ultra benchmark figures have been taken from Geekbench's database.

While the Apple M2 Ultra packs four more CPU cores compared to its predecessor (24 vs 20), it doesn't translate to much of a performance uplift. Then again, that figure will likely improve once a stable version of macOS Sonoma is released. Furthermore, the Mac Pro in question is probably pre-production hardware and might not perform to spec.

It'll be interesting to see how the M2 Ultra's massive 76-core GPU holds up in benchmarks. With the new Game Porting Toolkit emulator, it could even run AAA games at playable framerates, unlike the M2 Max, which performed on par with an AMD iGPU.

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