Review Apple Mac Studio (Early 2025) Review: Renewed vigor with M4 Max and M3 Ultra

[Admin]

The Mac Studio gets a performance boost with M4 Max and M3 Ultra power.

Apple Mac Studio (Early 2025) Review: Renewed vigor with M4 Max and M3 Ultra : Read more

 

[JamesJones44]

Thanks for the review! It's nice to seem some benchmark numbers outside of Geekbench. I thought maybe other benchmarks would show the Ultra would typically out perform the Max for highly parallelized applications, but Geekbench's multi core scaling was masking if that was true or not.

 

[m3city]

Wouldnt amd 7700 be a better comparison? Similar core qty, newer, same single core perf as apple newones.

 

[bit_user]

Thanks for testing. I'd never buy one, myself, but it's still nice to watch what's happening on the other side of the fence.

The single-threaded performance of the M4s seems very impressive.

Lastly, can you clarify whether higher or lower is really better, on the xcode benchmark? I'm pretty sure lower is better, although it's weird that the M2 Ultra came in below the M3 Ultra:

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[bit_user]

I thought maybe other benchmarks would show the Ultra would typically out perform the Max for highly parallelized applications, but Geekbench's multi core scaling was masking if that was true or not.

Geekbench's multithreaded benchmark is pretty useless. It tries to be something in between single-threaded and a fully MT benchmark. But, because we really don't know much about its intrinsic scalability, that ends up making it virtually impossible to divine much meaning from those numbers or use them to make predictions about specific workloads.

The best way to go is measure ST performance of each core type, as a way of characterizing the core. Then, measure fully MT performance. If I want to run something that's lightly threaded, I will know which end to extrapolate from, based on how many threads it has, relative to the CPU.