The Apple M2 Ultra processor lost in tests to competitors from AMD and Intel – it lacked cores and clock speed

The Apple M2 Ultra is a powerful processor with 24 general purpose cores and 76 integrated graphics cores. It’s likely faster than the 28-core Intel Xeon W found in the 2019 Mac Pro, and owners of Apple’s new workstations will see a noticeable performance boost. But in tests Geekbench 5 he could not beat the current competitors from AMD and Intel – they have too many cores and the clock speed is too high.

Image source: apple.com

Workstation processors are a special category. They combine the advantages of chips for desktops and servers: their performance must, on the one hand, scale like on a PC, and, on the other hand, demonstrate consistently high performance under high loads. This means high performance per clock, high clock speeds, a large number of cores, support for large amounts of memory and a high number of PCIe lanes. The 56-core Intel Xeon W9-3495X and the 64-core AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro W5995X meet these requirements.

Image source: tomshardware.com

The Apple M2 Ultra, on the other hand, is a pair of M2 Max stacked dies originally designed for the MacBook Pro and Mac Studio computers. The M2 Max chip provides neither high clock speeds nor expansion options – it supports fixed amounts of RAM, and disk space is not so simple. With the growth of workloads, built-in accelerators are used here instead of increasing the clock frequency. And due to power and cooling limitations, you have to make do with a relatively small number of cores. As a result, the Apple M2 Ultra, impressive on paper, is predictably inferior to the Intel Core i9-13900K in terms of clock speed and cannot compete with the AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro W5995WX in terms of the number of cores.

Therefore, in Geekbench 5 tests, Apple’s new flagship processor gives in to the Intel Core i9-13900K in single-threaded and multi-threaded workloads. It outperforms its direct competitors AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro W5995X and Intel Xeon W9-3495X in single-threaded tests, but is much slower when many cores are needed. Geekbench 5 is, of course, a synthetic benchmark, which does not always reflect the capabilities of the chip in real applications. But it gives an idea of ​​the capabilities of the central processor without taking into account special accelerators. And there are a lot of them on board the Apple M2 Ultra. Practice will show the real alignment of forces.