Early benchmarks for Apple’s newly-announced M3 chip are making their way to Geekbench 6 a few days after the company’s “Scary Fast” event. The purported results conducted on an M3-equipped Mac reveal sizeable performance gains over the previous M2 chip and an even bigger boost over the first-generation M1.
The purported benchmarks belong to a Mac with model identifier “Mac15,3” running an 8-core CPU on macOS Sonoma 14.1. The new chip obtained an average single-core score of 3000 and a multi-core score of nearly 11800. This represents a formidable gain of roughly 20% and 23% in single-core and multi-core results over the M2, respectively, which averages a single-core score of 2500 and a multi-core score of 9600.
Benchmark gains over the M1 are even bigger. That chip reports an average single-core score of 2300 and an average multi-core score of 8600. This means the new chip is roughly 35% faster than the M1 on both single-core and multi-core fronts.
Metadata from the benchmark results also confirms the base clock frequency of the M3 chip which stands at 4.05GHz. This is a welcomed increase over the M2 which is clocked at 3.5GHz, and the M1 at 3.2GHz. It’s still unclear which Mac these benchmark results were obtained from, as they could belong to either the refreshed iMac or the new entry-level 14-inch MacBook Pro.
Benchmark results for the M3 Pro and M3 Max chips on the higher-end 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros are yet to make their way onto Geekbench’s database but should be available relatively soon.
