The Apple M2 Ultra is a powerful processor with 24 general purpose cores and 76 integrated graphics cores. It’s likely faster than the 28-core Intel Xeon W found in the 2019 Mac Pro, and owners of Apple’s new workstations will see a noticeable performance boost. But in the Geekbench 5 tests, he could not beat the current competitors from AMD and Intel – they have too many cores and the clock speed is too high.
Image source: apple.com
Workstation processors are a special category. They combine the advantages of chips for desktops and servers: their performance must, on the one hand, scale like on a PC, and, on the other hand, demonstrate consistently high performance under high loads. This means high performance per clock, high clock speeds, a large number of cores, support for large amounts of memory and a high number of PCIe lanes. The 56-core Intel Xeon W9-3495X and the 64-core AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro W5995X meet these requirements.
Image source: tomshardware.com
The Apple M2 Ultra, on the other hand, is a pair of M2 Max stacked dies originally designed for the MacBook Pro and Mac Studio computers. The M2 Max chip provides neither high clock speeds nor expansion options – it supports fixed amounts of RAM, and disk space is not so simple. With the growth of workloads, built-in accelerators are used here instead of increasing the clock frequency. And due to power and cooling limitations, you have to make do with a relatively small number of cores. As a result, the Apple M2 Ultra, impressive on paper, is predictably inferior to the Intel Core i9-13900K in terms of clock speed and cannot compete with the AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro W5995WX in terms of the number of cores.
Therefore, in the Geekbench 5 tests, Apple’s new flagship processor gives in to the Intel Core i9-13900K in single-threaded and multi-threaded workloads. It outperforms its direct competitors AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro W5995X and Intel Xeon W9-3495X in single-threaded tests, but is much slower when you need a lot of cores. Geekbench 5 is, of course, a synthetic benchmark, which does not always reflect the capabilities of the chip in real applications. But it gives an idea of the capabilities of the central processor without taking into account special accelerators. And there are a lot of them on board the Apple M2 Ultra. Practice will show the real alignment of forces.
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