The first benchmarks of the M2 Ultra show the leap in performance. The first benchmarks with the M2 Ultra chip using Geekbench 6 show the improvement in terms of CPU performance.
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The chip in question is available on both the new top-of-the-line Mac Studio and the new Mac Pro.
With these Macs, you can choose two M2 Ultra chips when ordering: both offer a 24-core CPU, 32-core Neural Engine and 800 GBps of memory bandwidth, and both allow you to increase unified memory up to 192GB ; the difference is the number of GPU cores: one chip has 60, the other 76.
The Macrumors site reports tests on a Mac Studio with the M2 Ultra chip highlighting a single-core score of 2,800 and a multicore score of 21,700 with Geekbench 6 (a well-known cross-platform benchmarking utility, one of the most comprehensive for accurately measuring speed of processor and memory).
As expected, the M2 Ultra is up to 20% faster than the M1 Ultra, as Apple had already anticipated in the WWDC23 keynote, an event during which the latest Macs with the new chip were presented. M2 Ultra is basically the fastest chip presented by Apple so far.
As for the Compute test, which measures GPU performance, the results are around 220,000 for the M2 Ultra (60 cores), against 150,000 for the M1 Ultra (48 cores), a leap of 45%.
The Mac Pro with Apple Silicon chips – in terms of CPU – is basically 2 times faster than the previous fastest Mac Pro with Intel Xeon W 28-core processor.
Presenting the Mac Pro with Apple Silicon CPU in the WWDC23 keynote, the House of Cupertino had generically reported that the new machine “makes the most demanding professional workflows, such as video transcoding and 3D simulations, up to three times faster” .
The substantial difference between Mac Pro and Mac Studio are the PCIe slots present in the first. The Mac Pro comes with seven PCIe expansion slots that might be useful in certain environments where particular cards are needed.