M4 Pro Chip Benchmark Results Reveal an Extremely Impressive Performance Feat

[chucker23n1]

The base model is the value king for sure. Maybe the best value Mac of all time especially at the edu price of 499.

The mini pro seems to compete with the studio ultra on CPU benchmarks, but making the comparison fair requires maxing it to 64GB, 1TB, and gig Ethernet which takes it to $2500. Even then, you still have the differences in GPU, ports, and a few others. The base mini is absolutely the one I would (and likely will) get!

Sure, but the mini will even have Thunderbolt 5, if that strikes your fancy. It'll also still be $1,500 less. (But yes, overall fewer ports, though this doesn't matter that much on a desktop. Just have a dock nearby. For example, IMHO, HDMI is useful on the MacBook Pro to avert embarassing "I'm trying to present something at a client's, but they only have HDMI, and I don't have an adapter" situations. But on a desktop, you either need HDMI, in which case you'll have an adapter/dock/hub, or you don't.)

For those that actually need this much performance, best to wait a bit longer… a base M4 max studio will undoubtedly be a better performance value than a tricked out mini, if they keep the same pricing structure (which they have with the other models)… assuming they don’t discontinue it or something, haha.

Yep.

Although I suspect the Studio won't be coming for about half a year. Perhaps at WWDC, which is eight months out. But once it does get released, we'll probably be back to the situation where there's a nice gradient from mini (M4, M4 Pro) to Studio (M4 Max, M4 Ultra), at probably similar price points $599, $1,399, $1,999, $3,999.

So if you need a desktop Mac with decent mid-range performance soon? Get the mini.

 

[MayaUser]

How ironic.

Yes. Please post some real apps performa and stop with these benchmark that you “suggests” all users to avoid. Here we talk about M4 pro and not m2 ultra vs m3 etc
In my workload m3 is a diff beast regarding codecs compared to m2 even if both have the same codecs. That means apple besides cores improvements they improve the core itself, codec itself and so on. Synthetic Benchmarks are futile

 

[lilkwarrior]

I agree, old Mac will perform just like the day I bought it. I was just concerned about Apple iterates M chip a bit too often.

M3 series surely felt like an afterthought, barely a year old and already swept away with huge storm of faster, better M4 chips.

Most people don’t upgrade every year nor have computing needs that needs the latest and greatest to that degree.

A very specific segment of the world needs the best and fastest CPUs, GPUs, APUs, and monitors for overwhelmingly professional reasons in which trade-ins and corporate benefactors alleviate the costs involved with that.

 

[lilkwarrior]

The Mac Studio still has massively more RAM capacity than the M4 Pro. And the competition isn’t standing still. Apple needs to keep the pedal to the metal. If that means releasing an M4 Pro with a CPU faster than the M2 Ultra from 2022, so be it. If Apple doesn’t do it, then someone else will.

Also it’s always been conventional to get prosumer hardware during launch window unless you’re bottlenecked by a particular corporate upgrade window (in that case it’s not your money being spent or your FOMO problem to worry about)

 

[nostradumbass]

Yes, but it's about how you can't interpret what gb6 is about.

View attachment 2445207

I have a 9950X. Note it is 32 threads and can consume over 200 watts at peak. It's idle system power consumption is probably higher than most Apple Silicon under high load.

That's why Apple always shows an efficiency chart. Some people don't mind a little slower or the same performance if it means less energy bills. Especially if you are a company with many computers.

 

[MayaUser]

At this stage Apple needs to update mac studio and mac pro if they still care about them with m4 or m5 max/ extreme/ supreme whatever

 

[MayaUser]

I have a 9950X. Note it is 32 threads and can consume over 200 watts at peak. It's idle system power consumption is probably higher than most Apple Silicon under high load.

That's why Apple always shows an efficiency chart. Some people don't mind a little slower or the same performance if it means less energy bills. Especially if you are a company with many computers.

Agree but Nornal users cannot understand scaling and arhitecture and dont take in account everything. But at this point Apple should release an 200-300w peak chip for mac pro where efficiency really doesnt matter for those users and the performance outplayed the bills no matter what

 

[jlc1978]

If Apple ships an M4 Ultra that manages even the relatively poor core-increase-to-performance-increase of the M2 Max vs. M2 Ultra, that hypothetical M4 Ultra would be up in the 35,000 range and as far as I know completely without equal.

It will be interesting to see if Apple is really seriuos about the high end workstation market.

Because it creates confusion as when should I buy a Mac? Imagine spending $4000 for the most expensive, fully maxxed out dream setup Mac and just a year later Apple can squeeze the same performance on a base line Mac Mini?

Imagine getting a year plus of productive paying work with a high performance machine; that will still work just as fine despite new models coming out. In addition, it's not clear the Mini will beat it in all situations, based on juste a Geekbench score or the performance delta will be noticeable in real world usage.

You don’t need to upgrade because a new processor performs better on paper. You upgrade when you have a need the new machine solves. As always in tech…

Exactly, it's the use case that matters. All this noise about 8 vs 16, processor speeds, etc., is just that, noise.

It doesn't make sense to buy 3000$ machine today when next year likely the 1000$ machine would beat it.

It does if the productivity gains justify the price. You get a yers worth of gains and have a machine that still will meet your needs.

Means this is a bad time to buy that Ferarri. Would be cheaper just to keep getting the newest Honda every year, which exactly is my point from the first 😉

Unless teh Ferrari does soemthing you want that the Honda doesn't.

 

[nostradumbass]

Mac Studio with M4 Ultra:

• CPU: 48-core CPU
• GPU: 128-core GPU
• Neural Engine: 64-core Neural Engine
• Unified Memory: 256GB unified memory
• Storage: 8TB SSD

Mac Studio with M4 Extreme:

• CPU: 64-core CPU
• GPU: 192-core GPU
• Neural Engine: 96-core Neural Engine
• Unified Memory: 512GB unified memory
• Storage: 2 X 8TB SSDs

Edited storage. No 16 or 32TB SSD soon.

Probably 384GB memory on the M4 Extreme.

 

[ddhhddhh2]

It's actually hilarious - Apple releases something with great value for money and people still find ways to complain. At this point, I'm totally convinced that the old saying is true: Apple's gonna get hate no matter what they do lol

 

[picpicmac]

But then your complaint is "Apple devices offer very little internal expansion", which, true, but also nothing new.

Harkens all the way back to the original Macintosh, then the Mac512.

I used Macs back then (and since) and some of the engineers around would sneer at it, as being unexpandable, etc. They used original IBM PC AT or knockoffs (Zenith, NCR, etc.)

The reason Apple is still around and the Mac currently still embodies that original idea of a turnkey box is because most of us use a machine to do work and not for ego fluffing.

 

[ddhhddhh2]

You might have missed this, but a computer you bought a year or two ago being slower than a cheaper computer bought today has been happening for nearly the entire history of home computing. Things were stagnant for a while there due to Intel's issues with chip development, but mostly rapid improvements are the rule, not the exception.

You would have loved the PPC transition--in early 1993 a top-of-the-line professional Quadra 800 started at $4680; just over a year later the consumer-grade Power Mac 6100 was announced at $2000 with the same amount of RAM and a slightly larger, and depending on the benchmark you use was between 1.6 and 4 times faster (its floating-point performance, in particular, was massively higher). Less than half the price, twice the performance.

Same thing happened with the 60x to G3 CPUs, and again with the Intel to M-series transition, as well as many, many times in between, regardless of whether you were an Apple or Windows user.

The absolute-top-of-line iMac I bought 4 years ago, with a 10-core i9 CPU, is 30% slower than the M1 Max laptop I bought about a year later for around the same price, and that iMac's CPU is now slightly slower than my phone, which cost a quarter what the iMac did and fits in my pocket. But I'm not complaining, much less advocating Apple stop improving things so quickly so I don't have to feel bad that I got exactly what I paid for at the time and then somebody else got an even better deal a year later, and someone else will get an even better deal than them the year after.

You buy a computer. There's something way faster available for less next year. That's how it works.

This reminds me of back when I had my PPC Dual G5 while my girlfriend was using an iMac C2D. Most of the time, she was having a way better experience than I was - even when running C4D and Adobe apps. That was my first time realizing that Apple could actually make something both affordable AND good. And I mean, genuinely affordable and genuinely good. To be honest, even now, I don't miss the G5 at all. That PPC era G5? Zero nostalgia there.

 

[chucker23n1]

That's an impressive feat to be sure, but the more impressive achievement if you ask me is comparing those numbers to non-M-series CPUs.

If those M3 Pro benchmarks are indeed real (which they probably are, based on core count and M4 performance in the iPad), then that means Apple's current midrange laptop CPU is slightly faster than the i9-14900K, Intel's current top-of-line consumer desktop CPU--a $600, 125W base power, 253W max power, beast of a chip.

Intel has made significant gains in the past 3 generations, but having your top-of-line enthusiast desktop CPU still bested by a low-pro laptop CPU speaks to how far ahead of the game Apple was for a while there.

The Ryzen 9 9950X, AMD's consumer desktop top-of-line (with a 170W base, 230W peak power draw), is I believe a bit faster than the i9-14900K, but I believe still comes in a hair behind these M4 Pro results.


...Then there's the M4 Max; with two more performance cores and double the memory bandwidth, it should turn in scores significantly higher unless there's something really wrong with it. The difference between the 10-core and 12-core M3 Max is not proportional to the core speed, with the two cores only adding about 10% to the multicore results. If the M4 Max is the same, it will presumably score around 25,000 on Geekbench, if the extra media engine processors don't boost that. If Apple has managed to do better with its thermal management (I assume that's the bottleneck on the M3 Max), and/or the beefier media unit and extra memory bandwidth have a disproportionate impact, it wouldn't be shocking to see it manage above 27,000.

Looking past the gamer end of Intel and AMD's chart and into workstation CPUs, there's the AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 7995WX, with 96 cores and a monstrous 350W power draw. I think that's the current record-holder for CPU performance on Geekbench (it's not on their CPUs leaderboard officially yet), coming in somewhere around 28,000 or so; it'll be really interesting to see if the M4 Max can get up that high.

Intel's competing high-end-workstation W-series seems to be harder to find on the Geekbench browser, but as far as I can tell doesn't perform that much higher than the i9-14900K for the kind of tasks that Geekbench tests. The Threadripper is being marketed as a Workstation CPU, not a server CPU like the Xeon or EPYC, so it arguably should be in rough competition with Apple's Ultra series CPUs (even if those don't have ECC and presumably some of the other "workstation"-specific CPU features apart from the extra rendering engines). The M4 Max equaling it would be quite a feat.

If Apple ships an M4 Ultra that manages even the relatively poor core-increase-to-performance-increase of the M2 Max vs. M2 Ultra, that hypothetical M4 Ultra would be up in the 35,000 range and as far as I know completely without equal.

Dunno about M4 Max, and we only have a single (but plausible) M4 Pro result, but I took ten measurements each from the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X (Granite Ridge¹, 16p), the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K (Arrow Lake, 8p16e), and the AMD Threadripper¹ PRO 7995WX (Storm Peak¹, 96p) and did an arithmetic mean (if someone can convince me why a geometric mean would be better, I'd actually be quite curious to hear it), and ended up with

	Single-core	Multi-core	% better (single)	% better (multi)
AMD Ryzen 9 9950X	3420	22065	14.8%	2.7%
Intel Core Ultra 285K	3239	22442	21.2%	1.0%
AMD Threadripper PRO 7995WX	2903	27941	35.2%	-18.9%
Apple M4 Pro	3925	22669

So, the M4 Pro may not be a wrestling match contender since its name just isn't hardcore enough, but it beats all of them in single-core, and is comparable in multi-core, with the exception of the Threadripper Pro, which needs 96 p-cores to beat the M4 Pro's 10p4e setup.

(Granted, the Threadripper Pro is two generations behind.)

An M4 Max probably still wouldn't beat the Threadripper; even if we assume linear scaling (which we can't for multiple reasons²), the best-case score would be "only" 26,447.

¹ these are, somehow, real names
² including: 1) four cores are e-cores; we'd have to first separate those out 2) Geekbench 6, by design, penalizes high core counts 3) Apple's scheduler also isn't that great at scaling

 

[JosephAW]

Glad to see Apple is not sitting on new hardware technology for a few years and slowly trickling it out but instead rolling it out as soon as it’s available putting it in all their hardware.
Some of us grew up under the days where every year all we would get is a small bump in megahertz but it was still the same chip for years.

 

[neomorpheus]

Harkens all the way back to the original Macintosh, then the Mac512.

I used Macs back then (and since) and some of the engineers around would sneer at it, as being unexpandable, etc. They used original IBM PC AT or knockoffs (Zenith, NCR, etc.)

The reason Apple is still around and the Mac currently still embodies that original idea of a turnkey box is because most of us use a machine to do work and not for ego fluffing.

If you really want to go that route, then you should remember that the Apple ][ line sustained apple for a long time after the first Macs were released and it had expansion slots.

Also, when Apple released the Mac II line, they all had at least, one expansion slot.

Snake Oil salesman extraordinaire Jobs was the one that hated that the customers could expand and upgrade their systems and since Tim “dont be poor” cooks is an extension of Jobs mentality, we are were we currently are.

Trust me, if Tim was more in tune with The Woz, things would be very different.

Thats not saying that Jobs was completely wrong, since it did end with a corporation that’s basically printing money, but Apple for a while its simply bending us over, money wise.

Example, all memory and storage upgrades are pure profit for them.

Anyways, the combination of the new Mac Mini design plus the performance uplift of the new M4s are really enticing and i will be finally able to upgrade from my 2018 MBP.

 

[bradman83]

The M3 Max was the anomally, performance wise, because they never intended to release an M3 Ultra. The M4 Max is back to ”normal”, insomuch that it’s more about GPU performance gains.

The M4 Ultra will jump over the CPU performance gap by having 20/24 CPU cores. Also, thinking they’re ditching the 2xMax scheme they initially used and this next Ultra will be a wholly unique design. (and still think, we’ll see an M4 Extreme in the Mac Pro next summer 28/32 CPU cores)

Apple was rumored to be developing a single-die version of the M3 Ultra that they abandoned, likely because of yield issues with the N3B process node (bigger dies means more chances of a defect).

It wouldn't surprise me if they create a new M4 Extreme/Mega/Ludicrous Speed chip using 2 Ultra's stitched together, and making it a Mac Pro exclusive.

 

[ddhhddhh2]

Glad to see Apple is not sitting on new hardware technology for a few years and slowly trickling it out but instead rolling it out as soon as it’s available putting it in all their hardware.
Some of us grew up under the days where every year all we would get is a small bump in megahertz but it was still the same chip for years.

This really reminds me of the G4 era, haha! Funny thing is, I actually didn't hate the G4 - I quite liked it, actually. The G5, on the other hand, was a total letdown. From the early single 1.6GHz to the final dual 2.5GHz models, I can't remember a single moment when I felt truly satisfied with it. That's why I'm always thrilled to see Apple Silicon keep defying expectations.

 

[chucker23n1]

Can you imagine if iPhone is getting 3x faster each year?

There was an era where that was basically happening. Not each year, but not rarely either.

In Geekbench 3, the iPhone improved, year over year, as follows:

Yes, the iPhone 5 was more than thrice as fast at single-core as the iPhone 4S.

In Geekbench 4, things slowed down, but the iPhone 6S got a respectable 64% bump over the 6.

 

[Velin]

It's actually hilarious - Apple releases something with great value for money and people still find ways to complain. At this point, I'm totally convinced that the old saying is true: Apple's gonna get hate no matter what they do lol

Tim Cook basically said this in his WSJ interview. Said entire teams at Apple know and expect criticism and bad hot takes. But they soldier on, and as products improve, they eventually are proven correct most of the time.

 

[hoorayforhollywood]

Most are compatible, but many, if not most, developers don't allow it. Apple gives the option for developers to disallow running iOS/iPadOS apps on macOS. For example, the iPad versions of Baldur's Gate (1 and 2) can be run on Mac, even though there's Mac versions of those games already. Meanwhile, banking apps and many other games don't allow this, whether for security, support, or licensing reasons (e.g., the developer is only authorized to create the mobile port, and a different developer has already created the Mac version for release on Steam). It never quite materialized like how many hoped, and now we also have iPhone Mirroring (which my banking app doesn't work through either). If you search, you can find people finding ways to install iOS apps despite not being "allowed" to (a popular one was so people could play Genshin Impact).

Outstanding reply. Thank you.

 

[chucker23n1]

M3 series surely felt like an afterthought, barely a year old and already swept away with huge storm of faster, better M4 chips.

Would it have been better for Apple not to release the M3 at all, and not have new MBPs for almost two years? Why?

 

[Ael_MR]

It's actually hilarious - Apple releases something with great value for money and people still find ways to complain. At this point, I'm totally convinced that the old saying is true: Apple's gonna get hate no matter what they do lol

Have the Apple's behind the times without 32gb ram as default threads started yet?

 

[Velin]

Yes but my point stands 100% if apple is starting to make big generations difference

It's called engineering, research and development. If Apple doesn't do this, they are dead as a company. Nvidia, AMD, M$FT, and even Qualcomm, Intel, Huawei will eat Apple's breakfast, lunch & dinner if Apple doesn't push their lead every six months. Your point is 100% wrong.

On intel era to have triple the perf you could wait 5 years in some cases even longer.

And look where Intel is now: would be close to bankrupt without the enormous government cash infusions. As it stands now, Intel is losing market share hand-over-fist to ARM, Apple Silicon, Nvidia, AMD, everyone and everything is bashing Intel.

So for prof these macs longevity is weaker, we change them 1-2 /year

So, change your purchase routine to every three years. Or every five. Apple's rapid advancement does not mean you have to buy every year. This take makes zero sense.

 

[Manzanito]

I agree, and Apple should not wait too much on releasing it.

But they will.

 

[Manzanito]

Have the Apple's behind the times without 32gb ram as default threads started yet?

Give it ten years.