YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Apple M6 Pro Achieves the Highest Single-Core CPU Score in Geekbench 7

54 points gainsurier 4 hours ago 42 comments

galad87 1 hour ago | parent

Cool, but Apple didn't announce any M6 Pro yet, so where is this coming from?

mdp2021 1 hour ago | parent

Probably internal tests?

The software identifies the hardware, performs the benchmarks, and sends the heading and results to the Geekbench DB. Somebody who had the machine at hand must have run it.

tristanj 1 hour ago | parent

Internal leaks, these happen frequently. Employees have access to these devices for months prior to launch. Someone ran a benchmark and uploaded it on a machine they weren't supposed to.

gizajob 43 minutes ago | parent

I find that hard to believe at Apple. Not even possible that it’s accidental. They have their own internal tools, all packets leaving the network will be interrogated, leaking data is a sackable offence… if it’s in the geekbench database then it’s there because they put it there.

swiftcoder 39 minutes ago | parent

> Not even possible that it’s accidental. They have their own internal tools, all packets leaving the network will be interrogated, leaking data is a sackable offence

This is a story that folks like to tell, but it's not really how things work - at least since they stopped letting Steve Jobs lock all his engineers in the conference venue.

Leaks are a sackable offence at every tech firm, deep packet inspection firewalls are used all over the place, information leaks like this still happen pretty much every single product cycle.

VerifiedReports 17 minutes ago | parent

People love to tell stories about how stuff is done at Apple, which are often utter bullshit.

Not to mention that Apple has a huge number of teams, and no absolute standards across them. People would be shocked at the things Apple DOESN'T do.

Then again, with the current state of their QA, I think it's becoming clear what Apple doesn't do much of anymore.

dainiusse 26 minutes ago | parent

+1 . The only case it is allowed is Apple's own marketing team.

shim__ 1 hour ago | parent

How does Geekbench even verify what CPU I'm using? Couldnt you inject forged data and add a even faster M100?

fartfeatures 1 hour ago | parent

I thought they were skipping the M6 pro chips (or is that just the max and ultra?) to accelerate AI focused M7.

SXX 36 minutes ago | parent

This was just rumors like 99% of other Apple-related news.

GeekyBear 35 minutes ago | parent

The word was that they weren't going to ship systems with the M6 Pro, Max or Ultra.

The M7 generation has updated the tensor instructions in the GPU cores and they want to ship that ASAP.

reitzensteinm 24 minutes ago | parent

If they’re rushing the M7, it’s possible the M6 Pro and Max will be MacBook Ultra only. It would certainly give it quite a halo.

aurareturn 1 hour ago | parent

Wait. What?

This is actually the M6 Pro and not the M6. It has 18 CPU cores to the M6's 12. The scores line up as well.

Reports have said all along that Apple is skipping M6 Pro/Max to focus on M7 generation.

I can't remember the last time an Apple chip got leaked like this.

tristanj 1 hour ago | parent

These have leaked pretty much every single year for the M-series chips, a few weeks before launch. Occasionally for the A-series.

aurareturn 1 hour ago | parent

No, not the same. Those are review samples who got sent the product early. Those "leaks" happen AFTER the products have been officially announced by Apple.

Apple has not mentioned M6 Pro anywhere.

tristanj 1 hour ago | parent

Not accurate, both leak very frequently.

Leaked prior to launch - Leaked Benchmarks Confirm M2 Chip is Up to 20% Faster Than M1 https://www.macrumors.com/2022/06/15/m2-geekbench-benchmark/

Leaked prior to announcement - 'M2 Max' Geekbench Scores Leak Online, Revealing Rumored Specs and Performance https://www.macrumors.com/2022/11/30/m2-max-chip-geekbench-r...

Leaked prior to launch - M3 Max Chip Around as Fast as M2 Ultra in Early Benchmark Results https://www.macrumors.com/2023/11/01/m3-max-chip-benchmark-r...

Leaked prior to announcement - Mac M4 Chip Performance Unveiled in First Benchmarks https://www.macrumors.com/2024/10/07/m4-mac-chip-benchmarks/

Leaked prior to launch - M5 Chip Achieves Impressive Feat in 14-Inch MacBook Pro Speed Test https://www.macrumors.com/2025/10/17/m5-chip-macbook-pro-gee...

Leaked prior to launch - Apple's M5 Max Chip Achieves a New Record in First Benchmark Result

https://www.macrumors.com/2026/03/05/m5-max-geekbench-benchm...

Then add this one to the list.

aurareturn 1 hour ago | parent

Incorrect.

  Leaked prior to announcement - Leaked Benchmarks Confirm M2 Chip is Up to 20% Faster Than M1 https://www.macrumors.com/2022/06/15/m2-geekbench-benchmark/
Date of article: June 15, 2022 10:32 am PDT. M2 announcement was June 6.[0]

I don't feel like doing it for your other sources. They follow the same pattern. You can check official announcement dates vs "leaked" dates yourself.

[0]https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2022/06/apple-unveils-m2-with...

tristanj 1 hour ago | parent

That was a mistake and I updated it - only the M2 Max benchmarks leaked prior to announcement, not the M2.

Those M2 Max Geekbench benchmarks appeared on November 30, 2022. Apple announced the Apple M2 Max chip on January 17, 2023.

Similarly, those M4 Geekbench benchmarks for Mac were leaked on October 6, 2024, prior to Apple announcing the product. Apple announced the M4 Macs on October 28, 2024.

wartywhoa23 1 hour ago | parent

Leak'em right in the eyes!

morelikeborelax 48 minutes ago | parent

I thought the rumours were skipping M6 for the Mac Studio. Not for Macbook Pros and Mac Minis.

mdp2021 1 hour ago | parent

And how much would it cost?

In the current times performance/price seems to be increasingly important.

(Not to mention several other factors that once did not even exist, or were irrelevant.)

wartywhoa23 1 hour ago | parent

Highest among what? Is it highest among M* CPUs? Then what's the news, that the next gen is faster than the previous? Now that's a newsflash!

Or is it just an early advertisement, which it is? As in, "true Apple devotees, start planning your kidney sales to afford buying the M6 Pro among the first".

nottorp 1 hour ago | parent

I noticed a whiff of panic at the iphone 18 launch. Opened macrumors and there like 6 articles in a row about preordering the phone, how soon you can get the phone when you preorder, how long the queues are etc.

Guess they didn't get the expected # of preorders.

ErneX 58 minutes ago | parent

That might be true but they do all those pieces with every iPhone launch. They just churn out content a lot during iPhone launch period.

nottorp 24 minutes ago | parent

I've never seen 6 in a row before. And that's not counting the "feature list" articles.

JSR_FDED 5 minutes ago | parent

I doubt Macrumors knows what the iPhone 18 preorder numbers are.

zer0zzz 1 hour ago | parent

Highest among all CPUs. This isn’t new for Apple. Their stuff frequently bests ryzens etc at single threaded perf

ErneX 56 minutes ago | parent

Title is “highest single core score” so it’s the highest of every cpu tested on geekbench so far, not just of the subset of Apple CPUs.

OsrsNeedsf2P 1 hour ago | parent

I'm currently in the middle of porting a game from 2004 to run on MacOS via wine. On a 5000$ Macbook Pro, I'm getting about 4 FPS. This has multiple causes, including the game being single threaded and running through Rosetta, but damn is it hard to get good single core performance out of Macbooks.

Out of curiosity, I also ported the game to arm Linux with fex + upstreamed the wine patches in about a third the time and there's no FPS issues

mirsadm 57 minutes ago | parent

If anything it's the exact opposite. They're ridiculously powerful with more memory bandwidth than pretty much any equivalent PC. It is easy to make sloppy software because you can get away with so much.

SXX 47 minutes ago | parent

What porting you talking about exactly? Packaging existing binaries? Compiling source code making it more compatible with Wine?

In my experience as game developer and porting C++ code tells such difference usually mean there are something really wrong with syncronization primitives. So 99.99% of the time code does nothing just waiting for something to unlock.

galad87 32 minutes ago | parent

Running something with "Wine" doesn't usually mean "porting", "porting" means making a native binary that doesn't run through an emulation layer.

Anyway, probably you are trying to run a 32-bit executable with Rosetta, that won't be fast, because Rosetta was never meant to run 32-bit things and has got a lot of pitfalls.

logicallee 28 minutes ago | parent

Thanks for sharing your experience.

I recommend you try giving your AI an open ended task like, "it's at 4 fps even though it's a 22 year old game and the raw hardware performance is many orders of magnitude higher. Maybe due to running under Wine and Rosetta. Please figure out the simplest way you can unlock usable performance (30-60 FPS) short of decompiling, reverse engineering, and reimplementing the full game yourself natively. Maybe there is something else you can figure out for the performance unlock. The hardware is definitely there, so there has to be a way. The game is running so make sure you don't break it. Keep the same game behavior."

Regardless of which AI you're using, it will be able to figure something out in a few hours. 2004 pc's were 500-800 mhz, 128 MB RAM, and if they had a GPU at all it was 16-32 MB, 0.2-1 GLOP.

Your AI should be able to figure out a way to get it running in realtime.

CJefferson 28 minutes ago | parent

Something is going horribly wrong. I don't know what it is (without your code I don't know), have you profiled where it's going wrong? There's no way a game for 2004 would be that slow.

If you want help, I've done some similar work, you could pop it up on a github repo or something. What is the game?

a3w 59 minutes ago | parent

>4k? Thought not would barely twice that of an 15 year old CPU, but it of course is geekbench 7, not 6 or 5!

So this is different and faster than such a result in the old scoring would have implied.

fsh 7 minutes ago | parent

It is barely twice the score of a 6 year old Apple M1 though. And this is with much higher clock speeds (4.8 GHz vs. 3.2 GHz).

leptons 53 minutes ago | parent

Under exactly what cooling conditions? And for how long did it sustain this speed?

hncbw02z5a 49 minutes ago | parent

Spoofing IDs is easy, matching the timing curves isn't. That's the giveaway.

rrr_oh_man 47 minutes ago | parent

Load-bearing comment

danaris 37 minutes ago | parent

Would you mind elaborating, for those of us who don't live and breathe this stuff?

asimovDev 19 minutes ago | parent

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/single-thread/

https://browser.geekbench.com/v7/cpu/singlecore

here are the leaderboards for anyone else who was curious