Apple’s newly launched 14-inch MacBook Pro with the M5 chip has achieved a historic milestone in early benchmark results. The M5 recorded a Geekbench 6 single-core score of 4,263, the highest ever for any Mac or PC processor to date. This result marks the first performance glimpse of Apple’s latest 3-nanometer silicon and confirms significant generational progress in efficiency and power.
The M5 chip features a 10-core CPU with four performance and six efficiency cores. The new architecture balances performance and battery life, pushing Apple’s silicon beyond what most desktop chips can achieve. To understand how the M5 compares, here’s a breakdown of top benchmark results recorded so far:
- Single-core performance:
- M5 (14-inch MacBook Pro): 4,263
- M4 Max (16-inch MacBook Pro): 3,914
- M4 Pro (16-inch MacBook Pro): 3,871
- M4 (Mac mini): 3,784
- AMD Ryzen 9950X3D: 3,399
- Multi-core performance:
- M4 Max (16-inch MacBook Pro): 25,645
- M1 Ultra (Mac Studio): 18,405
- M5 (14-inch MacBook Pro): 17,862
- M3 Pro (14-inch MacBook Pro): 15,257
- M4 (14-inch MacBook Pro): 14,726
The results show a 20% improvement in multi-core performance over the M4 generation and a remarkable leap that places the base M5 nearly on par with the M1 Ultra. This means Apple’s standard 14-inch MacBook Pro now delivers workstation-level performance in a portable form factor.
Further improvements are also visible in graphics and AI benchmarks. The M5’s GPU achieved a Metal score of 76,727, up from around 56,000 on M4-powered Macs. CoreML AI tests show nearly 2.5x faster inference speeds, signaling a major leap for creative workloads, real-time effects, and on-device AI tasks. These results confirm that Apple’s fifth-generation silicon continues to expand its performance-per-watt advantage while remaining highly power efficient.
The new 14-inch MacBook Pro with the M5 chip is available for pre-order now and launches next week. Apple is expected to follow up with M5 Pro and M5 Max models in early 2026, extending the same architecture across higher-end configurations.
With these early benchmark results, the M5 marks a clear generational leap in Apple’s silicon strategy. It shows how the company is now using its 3-nanometer process not only for efficiency but also for AI and GPU scalability across devices. The same architecture is expected to extend to future models, including M5 Pro, M5 Max, and potentially the next Mac Studio configuration. If these results hold across more tests, the M5 MacBook Pro could redefine what Apple considers its “base” performance level for years to come.
