Just hours after Apple announced its new MacBook Pros featuring M1 Pro and M1 Max CPUs, the first benchmarks showed up online this afternoon. As is typically the case for unreleased products, the benchmarks appeared in the Geekbench database. According to the result, this is a 10-core M1X Pro with 32GB of on-package memory.
The M1 Max managed to post a single-core score of 1,749 and a multi-core score of 11,542. To put those numbers in perspective, the 13-inch MacBook Pro (M1) that we tested late last year delivered single- and multi-core scores of 1,733 and 7,584, respectively. The single-score score is not exactly earth-shattering, and the multi-core scores seem suspect as well, given that the number of performance cores doubled from four to eight compared to the M1.
We must say that we're a little disappointed that there isn't a larger jump in performance, especially given the price tag of the M1 Max-equipped MacBook Pros. A 13-inch MacBook Pro starts at $1,299, while the "cheapest" 14-inch MacBook Pro with an M1 Max (10-core GPU, 32-core GPU) costs $3,099.
However, there are a few caveats to mention regarding the stated performance numbers. For starters, the benchmarks were run on a pre-release version of macOS Monterey (21E140a), and the CPU reports a base clock of 24MHz. That last point could be attributed to Geekbench not correctly identifying the clock speed of the new M1 Max.
The first all-new 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pros will ship on October 25th, which means that we're bound to see even more benchmark results appear during the next week. We'll also be eager to see real-world GPU performance of the M1 Pro and M1 Max, as this is where Apple has promised some significant gains in performance compared to previous generations (and Intel-based competitors).