Apple M3 benchmarks leak: Is it as ‘Scary Fast’ as Apple said?

Apple’s long-awaited 3nm M3 chips finally have a release date of November 7, and it looks like they’re just as fast as Apple boasted at its Scary Fast event. According to leaked results in the Geekbench 6 database (via MacRumors), the M3 chip is “up to 20% faster than the M2 chip,” which is what Apple reported at its recent event.

It’s not clear whether these Geekbench 6 results are for the 14-inch MacBook Pro or the new iMac. The only thing that’s clear is that they’re results for the M3 chip, and performance results for both devices should be fairly similar.

M3 MacBook Pro Geekbench 6 results

Apple’s standard M3 chip features an 8-core CPU and up to a 10-core GPU with improved architecture that supports hardware-accelerated ray tracing and mesh shading. M3 chips are also equipped with a 16-core Neural Engine for AI and support for up to 24GB of unified memory. We were impressed with the gaming prowess of Apple’s M2 Max MacBook Pro, and these new M3 chips perform even better. 

The M3 chip has single-core and multi-core scores of about 3,000 and 11,700, respectively, in the Geekbench 6 database. When you compare these scores to those of the M2’s single-core and multi-core scores (around 2,600 and 9,700, respectively), the M3 chip is indeed up to 20% faster like Apple claims.

The jump in performance from the M2 chip to the M3 chip is slightly greater than the jump from Apple’s M1 chip to the M2 chip. The M1’s Geekbench score was around 8,315, about 17% slower than the the M2’s score of 9,700.

So far, there haven’t been any Geekbench results for the faster, more expensive M3 Pro and M3 Max chips. But if Apple’s claims about the standard M3 chips being 20% faster were true, then we can safely believe the company’s claim that the M3 Pro MacBook Pro will be “up to 40% faster than the 16-inch model with M1 Pro” and the M3 Max MacBook Pro will be “up to 2.5x faster than the 16-inch MacBook Pro with M1 Max.”