Apple just revealed its new M5 chip earlier this week alongside M5 versions of a new MacBook Pro, iPad Pro and a refreshed Apple Vision Pro. And now the first alleged benchmark result for the chip has leaked for the 14-inch MacBook Pro.
Based on the single result uploaded to Geekbench 6 today (October 17), the M5 chip is impressive and significantly faster than the M4 CPU. In single-core performance, the CPU reached a score of 4,263.
As far as I can tell, that number may be the highest single-core score ever submitted to the Geekbench 6 database from either a Mac or PC chip. The next highest scores I can see are an M4 Max at 3914 and an AMD Ryzen 9 at 3399.
The unconfirmed test hit a score of 17,862 in multi-core performance, which is about 20% faster than the M4 chip fromthe M4 MacBook Pro.
How the M5 compares to previous M-series chips
We've had the opportunity to test previous generations of M-series chips and can compare their average performance to those CPUs. In general, the M5 is faster than the older chips and about equal to the M1 Ultra, which is typically found in Mac Studios.
Here's a comparison based on our testing of older testing. Some chips, like the M1 Ultra, were tested on an older version of Geekbench, which I've noted.
M-series CPU |
Single Core |
Multi Core |
|---|---|---|
M5 |
4,263 |
17,862 |
M4 |
3,807 |
15,114 |
M4 Pro |
3,910 |
22,822 |
M4 Max |
4,060 |
26,675 |
M3 |
3,093 |
12,025 |
M3 Pro |
3,154 |
14,357 |
M3 Max |
3,200 |
21,711 |
M1 Ultra (Geekbench 5.4) |
1,792 |
23,931 |
As you can see, the M5 is blazingly faster than the other base-model M4 and M3 chips.
You can find a full breakdown in our ultimate M4 vs M3 vs M2 vs M1 rankings. Once we've had a chance to put the M5 through our lab tests, we'll be sure to add it.
Apple isn't expected to launch the Pro and Max versions of the M5 until early 2026. Presumably, those chips will be even faster, as you can see how the M4 Max and Pro compare to the base chip.
What do these scores mean?
The new 14-inch MacBook Pro features an M5 chip that has a 10-core CPU, with four performance cores and six efficiency cores. The single-core score refers to the performance achieved by one of the performance cores. The multi-core score is achieved through the maximum performance of all 10 CPU cores combined.
The single-core performance is important because you'll see its impacts on some games and apps, and it plays an important role in how responsive the overall system is.
The multi-core score reflects the maximum performance for multithreaded tasks, or how your computer handles multitasking in the operating system.
14-inch MacBook Pro M5 availability
The 14-inch MacBook Pro M5 is available for pre-order now and launches on Wednesday next week (Oct. 22).
While the higher-end M5 chips in the 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models aren't coming until next year, it seems the vanilla M5 is quite the performer.
Follow Tom's Guide on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our up-to-date news, analysis, and reviews in your feeds. Make sure to click the Follow button!
