Apple’s M3 Chip Might Be as Powerful as Advertised

In a not-so-spooky Halloween event, Apple announced its new MacBook Pro and iMac line with its new M3 chips. The new products will be available early next week, and a few early benchmark tests were done very recently to give an idea of how accurate the company’s claims were regarding the new chip’s performance.

As a reminder, Apple claimed that the new M3 chip features efficiency cores up to 30% faster than the M2 chip and up to 50% faster than the M1 family. For the performance cores on the M3, Apple promised an upgrade of around 15% compared to the M2 chips and up to 30% if you’re comparing it to the M1 family.

For the base model with an 8-core CPU and a 10-core GPU, Apple claimed that the CPU is 35% faster than the M1 chip and 20% faster than the M2. They also promised that the GPU would see a 65% upgrade as compared to the M1 and a 20% increase in performance when compared to the M2.

Recent Geekbench results have confirmed that Apple’s claims were not inflated. Admittedly, Geekbench testing can sometimes be inaccurate, but 9to5Mac has confirmed the benchmark results, too.

According to the benchmark results for the base model M3 MacBook Pro, the single-core performance is around 3000, and the multi-score is 11,700. Those figures are about 20% higher than the one on the base model M2 chip and about 30% higher than on an M1 iMac.

Here are some scores for context:

M1 iMac: Single-core at 2,300 and multi-core at 8,300

M2 MacBook Air: Single-core at 2,600 and multi-core at 9,700

M3 MacBook Pro: Single-core at 3,000 and multi-core at 11,700

It is important to note that synthetic benchmark results aren’t always exact representations of how a machine would perform in the real world. We will be able to see for ourselves once we get our hands on these M3-powered Macs.