M2 Ultra Chip Benchmark Results Reveal Impressive Performance Gains

[Longplays]

I have an M2 Ultra Studio with 128Gb and 2Tb SSD arriving this week. But I’m going from a late 2019 16” MBP to the Studio so the performance bump should be insane.

I wish I never bought my 2019 MBP 16" 14nm and just stuck with my 2011 MBP 13" 32nm until the 2021 MBP 16" 5nm came out.

I knew about the performance per watt gap of the iPhone vs same year Intel MBP as early as 2017.

Conventional thinking wouldn't allow me to think out of the box that Apple would leverage their iPhone chip fab capacity to jump from 14nm Intel to 5nm Mac chips resulting in higher raw performance, higher performance per watt, lower power consumption and longer battery life.

 

[Love-hate 🍏 relationship]

a

Keep dreaming . https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html

In terms of power consumption yes, but it is just thanks to TSMC more than apple.

wait that's only intel i9 , this is supposed to be xeon successor. do you know which chip we should be looking at , in order to compare m2 ultra ?

 

[Homy]

Keep dreaming . https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html

In terms of power consumption yes, but it is just thanks to TSMC more than apple.

Well, M2 Ultra isn't on that list and that's just single thread. The closest is M2 Pro/Max with only 10-12 CPU cores as nr 28-29 on that Passmark list against the top CPU with 24 cores. We'll see how well M2 Ultra with 24 cores will do.

 

[MrGimper]

Am I correct that the new M2 studio has HDMI 2.1 and the previous didn’t?

 

[ikramerica]

Intel chips have come a far way since the old intel Mac Pro and the 13900k is faster than the m2 ultra . So is ryzen 7950x. Also, the x86 workstation class chips like sapphire rapids and Genoa blow the m2 ultra away in terms of multithreading. Of course apple leads in terms of performance per watt.

I think the m2 ultra is fine in the Mac Studio but the Mac Pro, with all the extra room, is underpowered. And it’s still using pcie4 with pcie switches and lane sharing, whereas sapphire rapids and Genoa use pcie 5 and have a ton of lanes available. Much more flexible and can access more RAM.

Faster x86 chips are coming: arrow lake, zen 5, granite rapids Xeons.

Unless apple creates a workstation class chip I think apple will lead in notebook perf per watt, but when it comes to workstation and desktop, x86 will pull ahead.

But regardless of all that, competition is great for consumers. And I am glad to see apple start to embrace gaming on the Macintosh. Maybe apple has some wild ambitions in terms of GPU performance and is now laying the groundwork to introduce high performance gaming hardware…

It’s 2x faster than it’s very outdated predecessor!

Ignore the competition and their modern workstations with upgradable RAM and graphics. All that matters is that it’s unimpressively faster than the much older machine it replaces.

 

[sunny5]

That's not even close to Intel i9-13900K series on both Single and Multi which is Intel 7 based and not even 5nm based. Power by watt is the only advantage so far.

 

[Bustycat]

I want to hear the graphics results

Believe it or not:

Metal Benchmarks - Geekbench

 

[anshuvorty]

Man, I wonder if you could get Linux loaded onto the Mac Pro and then maybe brute-force the use of discrete AMD GPUs onto it? It would be fascinating to see if it could be done....

 

[chucker23n1]

That's not even close to Intel i9-13900K series on both Single and Multi

13900K: 2940 / 19837
M2 Ultra: 2837 / 21730

Sounds close to me.

 

[TheOneWhoKnocks]

All the whining in this thread means Apple is doing great.

 

[crut]

I wish I never bought my 2019 MBP 16" 14nm and just stuck with my 2011 MBP 13" 32nm until the 2021 MBP 16" 5nm came out.

I knew about the performance per watt gap of the iPhone vs same year Intel MBP as early as 2017.

Conventional thinking wouldn't allow me to think out of the box that Apple would leverage their iPhone chip fab capacity to jump from 14nm Intel to 5nm Mac chips resulting in higher raw performance, higher performance per watt, lower power consumption and longer battery life.

I really like my 16” but the projects are taxing it enough that it constantly sounds like an aircraft taking off

 

[designerdave72]

All the whining in this thread means Apple is doing great.

So, after all, it’s not the Studio that whines it’s the users? 🤣

 

[chucker23n1]

I mean it was 4 years ago , that's kind of expected

what processor would be today's equivalent within intel/amd series , as of today? 12th or 13th gen, but which xeon specifically?

The Xeon w7 2495X scores 2185 / 16671

There’s also the 3495X, which is more similar to the 2019 Mac Pro, but it draws a lot more power.

 

[TheOneWhoKnocks]

So, after all, it’s not the Studio that whines it’s the users? 🤣

You mean some guy you know from Harby's?

 

[Populus]

I have an M2 Ultra Studio with 128Gb and 2Tb SSD arriving this week. But I’m going from a late 2019 16” MBP to the Studio so the performance bump should be insane.

Wow, you’re going to be astonished by the jump in performance. If you have time and you feel like it, let us know how that machine feels.

 

[DestructoTim]

Intel chips have come a far way since the old intel Mac Pro and the 13900k is faster than the m2 ultra . So is ryzen 7950x. Also, the x86 workstation class chips like sapphire rapids and Genoa blow the m2 ultra away in terms of multithreading. Of course apple leads in terms of performance per watt.

I think the m2 ultra is fine in the Mac Studio but the Mac Pro, with all the extra room, is underpowered. And it’s still using pcie4 with pcie switches and lane sharing, whereas sapphire rapids and Genoa use pcie 5 and have a ton of lanes available. Much more flexible and can access more RAM.

Faster x86 chips are coming: arrow lake, zen 5, granite rapids Xeons.

Unless apple creates a workstation class chip I think apple will lead in notebook perf per watt, but when it comes to workstation and desktop, x86 will pull ahead.

But regardless of all that, competition is great for consumers. And I am glad to see apple start to embrace gaming on the Macintosh. Maybe apple has some wild ambitions in terms of GPU performance and is now laying the groundwork to introduce high performance gaming hardware…

Hmmm. I just checked Geekbench for the two processors you listed, and that doesn’t seem to be the case. They all have similar scores, though AMDs is slightly lower than Apple’s and Intel’s. So basically you can get the same performance on any brand you want, but Apple leads in performance per watt.

 

[Zest28]

Hmmm. I just checked Geekbench for the two processors you listed, and that doesn’t seem to be the case. They all have similar scores, though AMDs is slightly lower than Apple’s and Intel’s. So basically you can get the same performance on any brand you want, but Apple leads in performance per watt.

The $700 Intel i9 is faster in single score but slightly slower in multi score. And once you add a RTX 4090 to it, it will beat the M2 Ultra at a fraction of the cost.

 

[ChrisA]

20% is not enough of a reason for me (as a casual user) to upgrade my M1 Mac Studio Ultra to an M2 Mac Studio Ultra but I can see why businesses may well consider if if they can complete tasks 20% faster. Time is money and it won't take long to recuperate the cost of upgrading.

No one ever upgrades one generation. You keep the computer 3 to 5 years then buy whatever is available at that time. Perhaps you g from an M1 to an M3 or M4.

It is the same with cell phones, very few people buy a new phone every year.

As for businesses, there is a 3-year period for capital depreciation. You can't write it off in only one year.

Apple does not bring out these new products every year hoping people will trade in one year old computers, there are plenty of people with Macs from 2019 and even older and also new customers

Finally, even if the new Mac is 20% faster, the job you are doing will not be done 20% faster. For example, the above text I just typed would take just as long if I used a new Mac Studio or my old 2014 Mac Mini.

Mostly what our Macs do is wait for the user to move the mouse or type the next character. Look at "activity meter", mostly you see the CPU is sleeping, even if you have 15 browser windows open.

A faster CPU only helps when you do some compute-intensive task where yu have to wait and can do nothing productive while waiting. Mostly this happens if you do media editing but sometimes also some kinds of engineering tasks. But even when I use 3D CAD, I only have to wait for the computer now and then, maybe for a render to complete. Mostly the computer is waiting for me to do something.

 

[Zest28]

The Xeon w7 2495X scores 2185 / 16671

There’s also the 3495X, which is more similar to the 2019 Mac Pro, but it draws a lot more power.

There is a Intel i9 that does 3083 in Single Score and 21665 in Multi-Score.

Now add a RTX 4090 and the M2 Ultra is beat.

 

[Return Zero]

I know people are tired of talking about M3, but can you imagine if they really are working on stitching two ultras together for an M3 ludicrous or whatever it would be called… you’d get the 30-40% expected bump from M2 to M3, then another double factor in multi-core. That Geekbench could hit 60k. Graphics would also rival any of the top cards in the industry. That would be absolutely insane, and would instantly change the entire conversation about the new Apple Silicon Mac Pro.

 

[sunny5]

13900K: 2940 / 19837
M2 Ultra: 2837 / 21730

Sounds close to me.

Geekbench 6 Results - Geekbench

Geekbench 6 Results - Geekbench

Totally wrong. 13900K series are way higher than that which is around 3500, 255000.

 

[sunny5]

There is a Intel i9 that does 3083 in Single Score and 21665 in Multi-Score.

Now add a RTX 4090 and the M2 Ultra is beat.

M1 Ultra was close to RTX 3060, not even 3090 so I highly doubt that M2 Ultra would be much better.

 

[StupidOpinion]

can we please stop comparing brand new apple chips with old and outdated chips? what if i compared nvidia's 4090 GPU against apple's intel integrated chip from 2008?

 

[Zest28]

All the whining in this thread means Apple is doing great.

MacRumors is simply cherrypicking Intel CPU's, because if you pick Intel their latest Core i9 CPU's, it beats the M2 Ultra in Single-Core while offering the same Multi-Core performance.

And the Intel Core i9-13900KS costs less than $700, so you can build such a system for very cheap.

 

[dmr727]

M2 Ultra is perfect for the form factor of the Studio. It can't compete with the 13900KS, but that thing is just Intel jacking up the power consumption to retake the performance crown over AMD. At full load it's stupid hungry. I don't think Apple is ever going to care about competing in that space.