Apple M2 Max leaked benchmark gets us excited for MacBook Pros in 2023

MacBook Pro 13-inch M2 2022
(Image credit: Future / Lance Ulanoff)

Apple’s M2 Max chip, which will succeed the current M1 Max, has been spotted in leaked benchmarks giving us an idea of how much faster the next-gen variant might be.

As Wccftech reports, this comes in the form of Geekbench results picked up by Benchleaks on Twitter, which as always with leaks, we should be suitably cautious around.

In Geekbench, the M2 Max racked up a tally of 1,889 points for single-core, and in multi-core pushed ahead to 14,586.

Comparing that to the current M1 Max, which hits about 1,750 and 12,200 respectively, meaning that the M2 Max is shaping up to be around 8% quicker for single-core, and 20% more speedy in terms of multi-core performance.


Analysis: A tidy potential performance boost

It should be no real surprise that the M2 Max takes apparent further strides forward with multi-core performance, given that this chip runs with 12-cores (as shown in the Geekbench spec details here, and widely rumored previously), rather than the 10-cores the M1 Max sports. Two more cores should obviously make a fair bit of difference in multi-core tasks, of course.

Indeed, some folks might argue that they’d expect a little more from the next-gen chip than a 20% multi-core increase, but to us, this seems like a solid enough generational leap. Furthermore, remember this is still relatively early days for testing the M2 Max, and by the time the SoC is actually out there in Apple’s laptops, it’ll doubtless be a bit more honed performance-wise.

We shouldn’t get carried away with our expectations, though, either way, based on an early leaked benchmark. As ever, one single metric is far from the full picture of performance, and the M2 Max will require a broader raft of tests before any conclusions are drawn when it does actually turn up.

When might that be? The rumor mill reckons that new Apple laptops with M2 Max and M2 Pro chips are set to debut in the first quarter of 2023, and those will be MacBook Pro 14-inch and 16-inch models, according to one well-respected source on all things Apple.

Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).