Apple M3 series smashes past Raptor Lake and Dragon Range to dominate PassMark's laptop CPU single-thread chart

The laptop CPU space is looking incredibly strong at the moment thanks to the introduction of the Apple M3 series, which has joined the powerful Raptor Lake-HX chips from Intel and the multi-tasking monsters of AMD’s Dragon Range 7045 series at the top of PassMark’s benchmark charts. The 11-core Apple M3 Pro is now the top dog in the single-thread performance laptop CPU chart with a score of 4,910, and it is followed by the 8-core M3 on 4,818, the 12-core M3 Pro on 4,803, and the 16-core M3 Max on 4,673. In addition to these four chips, the M3 family also includes the 14-core variant of the M3 Max.

This has become something of a recurring theme with each release of Apple M-series processors. Both the M1 series and M2 family also impressed on this particular benchmark, seemingly matching the x86 competition from Intel and AMD in an effortless manner, pulling out similar benchmark results while taking advantage of the well-known ARM architecture efficiency capabilities. The new 8-core M3 chip relies on approximately 20 W (under load), while the AMD Ryzen 9 7945HX (single-thread score: 4,108) can range from 55 W to 75 W and the Intel Core i9-13980HX (single-thread score: 4,352) can guzzle from 55 W to a huge 157 W.

When it comes to the multi-task test suite, the overall scores for the above-mentioned Team Red and Team Blue processors do look impressive, with the 16-core Apple M3 Max being the closest ARM rival in that particular chart. As for generational improvement, the difference between the single-thread performance of the base M3 and the base M2 is a very satisfactory +22.1%. As for the CPU Mark improvement, which involves a test suite of benchmarks, the 8-core M3 posts a score of 19,236 compared to the M2’s 15,426, which is an even better generational increase of +24.7%.

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