Amazing! M1 Ultra Chip Outrank 28-Core Intel Mac Pro in First Test

The first test for Apple’s M1 Ultra processor came up on Geekbench after yesterday’s “Peek Performance” event announcement, revealing that the doubled-up M1 Max is actually able to surpass the highest-end Mac Pro as Apple promises.

Dubbed Mac13,2, the Mac Studio with the 20-core M1 Ultra that was benchmarked earned a single-core score of 1793 and a multi-core score of 24055.

In this specific test comparison, the highest-end Mac Pro with a 28-core Intel Xeon W CPU has a single-core score of 1152 and a multi-core score of 19951, implying that the M1 Ultra is 21% faster in terms of multi-core performance. In terms of single-core performance, the M1 Ultra outperforms the 28-core Mac Pro by 56%.

Apple has stated that the M1 Ultra is up to 60 percent quicker than the 28-core Mac Pro when it comes to CPU performance, so Apple may be addressing single-core disparities in the figures that it revealed during today’s presentation. This is only one test, so we might see the M1 Ultra doing better in further benchmarks after the March 18 release of the Mac Studio.

GPU Performance Against Mac Pro

Furthermore, additional testing against Apple’s Mac Pro also shows the new M1 Ultra GPU is now Apple’s fastest Apple silicon processor, unseating the M1 Max as the top-of-the-line alternative. With the strength of the upgraded CPU, the new Mac Studio is able to exceed not just the high-end prior-generation 27-inch iMac, but also the top-of-the-line 28-core Mac Pro.

The M1 Ultra chip includes a 20-core CPU with 16 high-performance cores and 4 high-efficiency cores, a 64-core GPU, 128GB of unified memory, a 2x more powerful media engine, and memory bandwidth of 800GB/s.

In terms of CPU performance, the M1 Ultra is 3.8x faster than the highest-end Intel Core i9 iMac (now discontinued) and 60% faster than the 28-core Mac Pro with an Intel Xeon W processor.

M1 Ultra GPU Performance

In terms of GPU performance, the M1 Ultra is 4.5x faster than the 27-inch iMac and an astounding 80 percent faster than the highest-end Mac Pro with AMD Radeon Pro W6900X graphics. The Mac Studio was advertised as “up to 80 percent quicker” than the fastest Mac Pro.

The M1 Ultra supports 18 streams of 8K ProRes 422 video, which Apple claims no other machine in the world is able to achieve.

All of Apple’s silicon CPUs provide exceptional power efficiency, and the M1 Ultra is no different. According to Apple, the M1 Ultra is able to give 90 percent more performance than the fastest 16-core PC CPU within the same power envelope, and it can achieve the PC chip’s top performance using 100 watts less power.

It delivers equivalent performance to “one of the most popular discrete GPUs” while consuming 1/3 as much power, and it gives quicker performance than the top-end discrete GPU while using 200W less power.

Price of Mac Studio With M1 Ultra Chip

The Mac Studio with the M1 Ultra chip is priced beginning at $4,000, and it is ready for purchase as of today.