M5 Max MacBook Pro could deliver ‘astounding’ Geekbench scores

We’re likely less than two weeks away from the launch of the M5 Pro and M5 Max MacBook Pro models. Performance estimates based on extrapolating from the difference between the base M4 and the more powerful variants suggests that the M5 Max MacBook Pro could deliver “astounding” Geekbench scores.

The analysis suggests that the M5 Max chip may be the first Apple GPU ever to break 250,000 on the Geekbench 6 compute test …

M5 Max MacBook Pro forecast performance

Macworld’s Jason Cross ran the numbers.

By looking at the leap in performance between the standard M4 and the M4 Pro/Max, and then applying that to the base M5, we can come up with a pretty good estimation of what the M5 Pro/Max performance will be.

Those are pretty stellar estimated scores for the top-end M5 Max. Around 4,500 for single-core CPU performance is a lot, but over 31,000 for the multi-core score is astounding. That’s in the same league as chart-topping 64-core AMD Threadripper CPUs.

The [40-core] M5 Max may be the first Apple GPU to break 250,000 on the Geekbench 6 GPU compute test. Even the M3 Ultra, with its 80 GPU cores, landed just a hair under it. If Apple can get there with half as many GPU cores in just two processor generations, that’s an impressive pace of improvement.

Estimates for graphics performance would put both the M5 Max in the same territory as a pretty beefy NVIDIA GPU widely viewed as offering the best performance/value mix for serious gamers.

The most impressive gains on the base M5 were in graphics performance, and if that holds true for the M5 Pro and Max, we’re in for a treat. A score over 2,300 on Steel Nomad is a little better than the laptop version of the GeForce RTX 4050. The bigger M5 Max, with a score over 4,600, would be comparable to a GeForce RTX 4070.

Possibility of more flexible configurations

One of the changes expected for the meatier versions of the M5 chip is separating the CPU and GPU.

Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo says that for the M5 Pro chip, Apple will be taking advantage of TSMC’s very latest chip packaging process known as SoIC-mH (System-on-Integrated-Chips-Molding-Horizontal).

Cross speculates that this may see Apple offer more flexible configurations.

This would allow Apple to freely mix and match CPU and GPU core counts. It’s unlikely that Apple would allow any configuration you can think of, but it may be possible to buy an M5 Pro or M5 Max chip with more GPU and less CPU, if that would be a better balance for the workloads you run.

This is by no means certain, however.