The brand-new model, which was just released a few days ago, M5 Max The chip—I never would have guessed Geekbench The benchmark results are already out, and they’re quite impressive. In the Geekbench 6 multi-core test, the M5 Max not only leads by a wide margin AMD The flagship Ryzen AI Max+ 395 laptop is about 25% faster, and even Intel And AMD’s desktop processorsProcessorIt also surpasses expectations—you could say it’s pretty impressive.
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M5 Max Geekbench Scores Leaked: Multi-Core Score Exceeds 29,000
The M5 Max was announced by Apple on March 3, 2026, along withNew MacBook Pro The M5 Pro was also released at the same time.
In terms of specifications, the M5 Max features an 18-core CPU, comprising 6 “Super Cores” and 12 “Performance Cores,” a GPU with up to 40 cores, and a 16-core neural engine. It supports up to 128GB of unified memory with a maximum bandwidth of 614GB/s. The entire chip is built using TSMC’s third-generation 3-nanometer process and supports the Thunderbolt 5 interface.
According to Geekbench The following are the test results for the M5 Max (18-core CPU version) from the database:
- Single-core score: 4,268 points, an increase of approximately 9% compared to the previous-generation M4 Max
- Multi-core score: 29,233 points, about 14% faster than the M4 Max
It’s even 5.4% faster than the previous flagship, the M3 Ultra, making the M5 Max the fastest Apple chip available today:
What’s even more noteworthy is that the M5 Max’s multi-core performance far surpasses that of its competitors—not just among laptops, but even among desktop computers.
The M5 Max is about 25% faster than the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 and outperforms the Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX by about 30%. These two are currently the flagship processors in the Windows laptop lineup:
In the desktop processor category, the M5 Max’s multi-core performance surpasses that of the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K and AMD Ryzen 9 9950X by approximately 23%, and is 5.1% faster than AMD’s 64-core workstation processor, the Threadripper 9980X:
In terms of GPU performance, the 40-core version of the M5 Max scored between approximately 218,772 and 232,718 on the Geekbench Metal graphics test, which is about 20% faster than the M4 Max, though it remains slightly lower than the M3 Ultra by about 5% to 10%:
Although the M5 Max has a significant lead, it’s important to note that the M5 Max is based on the ARM architecture, while Intel and AMD processors use the x86 architecture—there are fundamental differences in their underlying designs. Although Geekbench is a cross-platform benchmarking tool that allows processors based on different architectures to be compared under the same scoring system, it is ultimately just a “synthetic benchmark” that measures performance under specific computational scenarios.
In practical use, different software is optimized to varying degrees for different architectures; some professional software runs more smoothly on x86 platforms, while others are more efficient on ARM platforms. This also means that Geekbench data can serve as a reference point for understanding the general performance gap between different processors, but it cannot be directly equated to the claim that “the M5 Max is faster than a desktop processor under all workloads.”
In any case, the Geekbench 6 benchmark results confirm that the M5 Max truly boasts impressive processing power, so anyone interested should definitely consider buying one.
Source: KOCPC Chinese