Apple M3 Ultra thrashes Ryzen 9 9950X and Core Ultra 9 285K in Cinebench 2024 CPU test by as much as 30%
The recently refreshed Apple Mac Studio is quite a beast, to say the least. At the highest-end, the Mac Studio can be equipped with the M3 Ultra chip, which is an absolute unit of an SoC. With a 32-core CPU and a massive 80-core GPU, the M3 Ultra promises performance that is not only the best that a Mac has to offer, but also one of the highest that can be extracted from a sub 500-watt system. There is hardly anything on the x86 side that the M3 Ultra can be compared to, as it sits in a weird position where it easily surpasses high-end consumer chips, but unsurprisingly fails to match the core counts of server parts.
Apple M3 Ultra: True multi-core heavyweight
For instance, a high-end x86-based system in the price range of the Apple Mac Studio will likely be equipped with either a 16-core AMD Ryzen 9 9950X (currently $544.74 on Amazon), or a 24-core Intel Core Ultra 9 285K processor. According to Cinebench 2024, the 32-core M3 Ultra quite easily sweeps the floor with both of the aforementioned x86 systems. With a score of 3,000, the M3 Ultra leads the Ryzen 9 9950X by 25%, and the Core Ultra 9 285K by around 30%. Of course, these scores are to be expected, considering the substantially higher core count for the M3 Ultra.
That said, there is no denying that the Apple M3 Ultra will have the upper hand in the vast majority of CPU-bound tasks over any x86-based consumer desktop currently available on the market. As we have noted previously, the M3 Ultra GPU performs somewhere between the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 and RTX 5080, but real-world performance will most certainly vary depending on the workload. Moreover, the fact that the M3 Ultra can be paired with up to 512 GB of unified memory allows it to tackle workloads that were simply not previously possible on a consumer desktop.
As more testing surfaces, the M3 Ultra's capabilities will certainly become clearer. There is no doubt that it will have a major lead in overall efficiency, but performance will most likely boil down to how well developers optimise their software to take advantage of the otherwise impressive hardware. Rumor has it that Zen 6 CPUs from AMD will boast up to 24 performance cores, which will certainly be a true competitor for the Apple M3 Ultra. But for right now, it is clear that Apple's highest-end offering will hold the crown for multi-core performance in a consumer system.
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