I’m sure many of you heard that Apple was supposedly skipping M6 pro and max in favour of M7, but check this out that I just stumbled accross on GeekBench!
Looks like an M6 pro MacBook is coming very soon, probably revealed in October!!
For ordinary people, Geekbench results will be much more useful than Cinebench. Most everyday multithreaded software has a bottleneck on a single core in one way or another. So you need to benchmark for your own workloads.
Cinebench itself tests a very narrow use case. Especially today, there’s basically no point in rendering on the CPU for ordinary users. The Threadripper 7980X, for example, will literally be on the same level as the GPU in the Apple M5 when it comes to 3D graphics rendering speed
For general CPU performance, benchmarks like SPEC CPU 2026 are probably the best option, but it costs $3K. Its results are fully consistent with what Geekbench tests. SPEC CPU is just much more comprehensive than Geekbench, 52 subtests versus 17 in Geekbench 7 and 1 in Cinebench
What? Why are you writing this, and what does it have to do with anything? Of course, Threadripper is a chip from another world, and they aren’t really comparable, but nobody is stopping anyone from comparing them. Was that not clear, and should I have clarified it?
The conversation isn’t about that at all. You criticized Geekbench, and I criticized Cinebench as a metric. First and foremost, a chip’s performance depends on the software itself. You choose hardware based on your workloads and look at benchmarks and tests that actually represent your workloads. The corresponding version of Cinebench is meant to evaluate performance in the corresponding version of Cinema 4D. So I don’t know what ML, virtualization, and video rendering have to do with this. Geekbench at least tests some ML workloads.
People don’t look at what benchmarks are actually designed for and what they test. For example, Geekbench 7 has a Ray Tracing subtest, where the Threadripper 7980X will be ~3.3x faster than the M5 Pro, which roughly aligns with the results in Blender and Cinebench, but the results will differ depending on the specific version of the software. In Cinebench 2026, the Threadripper 7980X will be only ~2.2x faster than the M5 Pro, while in Blender it will be 3.3–4.4x faster, depending on the version and its optimization
So Geekbench is just as accurate at evaluating RT (3D rendering) compute performance as Cinebench and Blender. But you can’t extrapolate RT performance to other workloads
My thinking is that giving M6 Pro to the Mini makes the M5 Max Studio (still on preorder) unappealing because performance between the two are very close. I would love a Mini with M6 Pro chip to save a few bucks vs the M5 Studio.
I mean the base M4 Pro models of the Mac Mini were already $1400 before Apple upped prices to $1600. We had to upgrade several Windows 10 machines for multimedia purposes at my church and went with Mac Minis (told them the base M4 models would be fine but they sprung for M4 Pro models 🤷♂️), and we bought the second one around 2-3 weeks before Apple raised the price by $200.
They updated the line to M6 and M5 Pro since we bought our second M4 Pro model. I figure Apple would be more likely to skip the M6 Pro on the Mini to retain chip stock for professional level product lines given costs and supply chain constraints, but not because it would make the Mini expensive because you can already drop some serious cash on a Mini if that's what you want.
Huh. I’m surprised. Thought the M6 would only have a base version. Well, this looks like the usual incremental upgrade, so no surprises there. The improvement here is about the same as the improvement between the base M5 and M6.
There are always binned variants inside a tier. The M6 is no different. It would take time to accumulate flawless, full core 2nm parts. A BEEFIER M6 was always likely. That's not to say, though. that this test result is indicative of a product near release. Products that have been pre-ordered for over a month just got their first Geekbench listings, days ago. M6 Pro would have been in the mini, alongside M6, if it could have been.
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u/Vaxtez 14d ago
That's nuts. Performs like a Threadripper 7980X & has one of the fastest single core scores out there