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Apple’s M2 Max chip may bring next-level performance to the MacBook Pro

Apple’s M2 Max chip is not out yet, but some benchmarks of it already are. One such test was leaked today, showing off the performance of the new processor.

According to these scores, we might see a decent performance boost in the future MacBook Pros that will likely come with the M2 Max chip. Of course, things can still improve.

Benchmarks of the Apple M2 Max CPU.
Geekbench 5

The Apple M2 Max chip is going to be the first of the two premium CPUs in this generation of Apple products. In all likelihood, it will be dethroned by the M2 Ultra, but there’s no telling when that is going to come out — the rumors say that we won’t see it until 2023. As for the M2 Max, it’s already out in the wild in some capacity, and now, a benchmark of it appeared on Geekbench.

According to the test, the M2 Max CPU will come with 12 cores, but we don’t know how many of these cores will be of the performance or efficiency variety. We do know, however, that the M2 Max adds an extra two cores compared to its M1 version which maxed out at 10. The CPU had a base clock of 3.54GHz and maxed out at 3.7GHz, and it came with a modest 4MB of L2 cache. The device also had 96GB of onboard memory, but it’s unspecified which exact Mac we’re dealing with here.

As far as benchmark scores go, the M2 Max did a good job. It scored 1,889 points in single-core and 14,586 in multi-core. Wccftech notes that this marks an increase of around 10% in single-core and 20% in multi-core operations compared to the M1 Max. It’s very likely that these scores will go up by a few percent once the final version is released, so we might see an up to 25% victory over the previous generation.

This iteration of the M2 chip is expected to arrive in the next generation of MacBook Pros, so these benchmark results are among the first real hints about the performance of these next-gen notebooks.

Apple is ramping up the performance, and although the gains over M1 are not as outstanding as what we’ve seen when Apple first switched from Intel to its own silicon, these scores still bode well for the new chip. The M2 Max chip will be no match against the best processors on the market, though, but the M2 Ultra might come close.

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Monica J. White
Monica is a UK-based freelance writer and self-proclaimed geek. A firm believer in the "PC building is just like expensive…
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