First M3 Mac benchmarks release & Apple may be onto a winner

Benchmarking scores for Apple’s latest M3 are out and the chip offers a 20% performance improvement over the M2 processor.

Apple introduced the new M3 chip during its “Scary Fast” event earlier this week. The new silicon will power the new MacBook Pro and iMac, offering a significant performance boost over the M2 generation.

During the keynote, Apple announced the M3 chips bring improvements in efficiency, battery life, and raw power. While most of these claims have yet to be verified, early standard M3 benchmark scores show the chip outperforms the M2 in terms of raw performance.

Apple’s M3 chip is 20% faster than M2

The first benchmark results for the standard M3 chip have appeared on the Geekbench 6 database, as reported by MacRumors. The scores corroborate Apple’s claims of improvements in the chip’s CPU performance.

As per the Geekbench listing, the M3 chip managed to get single-core and multi-core scores of around 3,000 and 11,700, respectively. This makes the chip 20% faster than M2, which received single-core and multi-core scores of around 2,600 and 9,700.

The standard M3 chip, like the rest two chips (M3 Pro and M3 Max), is based on a 3-nanometer architecture. It has an 8-core CPU and up to a 10-core GPU, and supports up to 24GB of unified memory.

There are also features like dynamic caching, mesh shading, and ray tracing. The GPU performance on the chipset is claimed to be 65 percent faster than the original M1 chip.

While the benchmark scores of the standard M3 are out, we have yet to see any benchmarks of the higher-end M3 Pro and M3 Max. These three chips will be powering the new MacBook Pros, which will be available for purchase starting November 7.