Apple's recently-launched M3 and M3 Max processors are faster than their predecessors and can challenge their respective rivals from AMD and Intel in Geekbench 6, according to published and leaked benchmark scores. Higher performance is enabled by considerably higher clocks as well as increased core count. That said, Apple's high-end workstation SoCs still cannot compete against workstation-grade offerings from renowned CPU developers.
Ever since Apple started to develop its own general-purpose cores over a decade ago, it focused primarily on power efficiency — which is why its microarchitectures were tailored for high instruction level parallelism, with their eight-wide decode block, rather than for high clocks. The company's M-series processors feature cores derived from smartphone-oriented A-series SoCs and have a similar sheer width, but can run at higher frequencies due to higher power budgets.
