Apple blew everyone away! The base M6 chip has very powerful graphics and processor

Quite a lot has been known about the processor part of the Apple M6 chip for some time, but the graphics remained in the shadows. That has now changed — enough results have accumulated in the Geekbench database to draw conclusions. And they are remarkable.

A third higher in one generation

The twelve-core graphics in the M6 achieve approximately 93 thousand points in the Metal test. The previous M5 with ten-core graphics was 31 percent lower, so the year-on-year shift is significant — especially considering that part of the increase is due to two additional cores.

The processor part confirms what we already know. The results show 4,071 points in the single-core and 22,783 in the multi-core test, with single-core performance climbing up to 4,600 points in one measurement. In multi-core evaluation, the base M6 thus matches the M3 Max chip, which was the top of the line three years ago.

Cannot compare with Nvidia

The Metal interface is used exclusively by Apple, so results from this test cannot be compared with graphics cards from Nvidia or AMD — the numbers simply wouldn’t correspond.

There is also an OpenCL test, where the M6 achieves approximately 58 thousand points and barely keeps up with the eight-year-old GeForce RTX 2060 Max-Q graphics, but even this comparison is misleading. Apple ended OpenCL support in macOS about eight years ago, so the results from it say little about the chip’s true capabilities. Anyone who would infer from them that Apple is lagging would be making a significant inaccuracy.

Let’s recall that the M6 chip debuted in the new Mac mini at the end of August. All the figures mentioned come from benchmark databases, not from our own measurements — the definitive picture will only be provided by tests of finished computers.

Are benchmark results a guide for you when buying, or do you just take them as an interesting fact?

Source: Notebookcheck, Geekbench