Last Monday, Apple announced the M3 SoC, the world's first chip to use TSMC's 3nm silicon. While there's speculation that the M3 was rushed , which could lead to low initial stock, what will matter in the long run is whether the M3 SoC is significantly more powerful. Apple is aiming to win over MacBook users still using Intel silicon, rather than those who already own a MacBook with an M1 or M2. Therefore, the first benchmarks of the M3 have already appeared , demonstrating considerable performance improvements.
Today, the first benchmark results for the standard M3 chip appeared in the Geekbench 6 database. And the results show that, even compared to the original M2, the improvement is substantial and noticeable.
The Apple M3 represents a great advance compared to the M2 according to the first benchmark
Based on the results obtained so far, Apple's M3 has achieved single-core and multi-core test scores of 3.000 and 11.700, respectively in the Geekbench 6 benchmark. The standard M2 chip has single-core and multi-core scores of around 2.600 and 9.700, respectively.
So, the M3 is up to 20% faster than the M2 chip, as Apple stated in one of its slides during its " Scary Fast " event last Monday. To put this into context, the original M1 scored around 8.315 points in multi-core tests, meaning the M3 offers approximately a 40% performance improvement.
The results published on Geekbench 6 bear the identifier "Mac15,3". According to Mark Gurman of Bloomberg, this would be a laptop with the same screen resolution as a 14-inch MacBook Pro. The standard M3 SoC is equipped with an 8-core CPU and a GPU with up to 10 cores , and supports up to 24GB of unified memory. Its GPU enables hardware-accelerated ray tracing and mesh shading, designed for high-end gaming—a sector that has historically been limited for Mac users. It also features a 16-core neural engine for artificial intelligence.
The results of the M3 Pro and M3 Max for the new 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pro models remain to be seen. But they will most likely not take long to appear in the coming days.
