Apple M5 makes Geekbench debut with impressive performance gains

The highly anticipated Apple M5 has finally made its debut alongside a new iPad Pro and MacBook Pro. Apple has made some lofty claims about its performance; now, we get to see if they're true via a Geekbench listing. It shows up alongside a MacBook Pro with 16 GB of RAM.

It scores 4,263 in Geekbench's single-core test, effectively making the Apple M5 about 13% faster than the Apple M4 (3,748 average). In multi-core, the M5 scores 17,862 points; a 17% increase over its last-gen counterpart (15,173 points). 

Apple takes the single-core lead back from Qualcomm's Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme X2E-96-100 (4,080), but fails to do so in multi-core performance; not surprising given the X2 Elite has 18 CPU cores versus Apple's 10.

And the best part is, Apple achieves this lead at a far lower boost clock of 4.61 GHz, whereas Qualcomm had to push its silicon to 5.0 GHz to achieve similar results. The Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme benchmarks were sourced from a Qualcomm reference laptop, while the MacBook Pro above is a pre-production unit.