Apple's 18-Core M5 Max Beats AMD's 96-Core Threadripper in Benchmark, But Experts Warn of Test Limitations

Apple's 18-core M5 Max stuns in Geekbench 6 benchmarks, outscoring AMD's 96-core Threadripper Pro, though experts caution the test favors fewer, faster cores and doesn't scale beyond 32 threads — still, the chip's 29,644 multi-core score and 614 GB/s memory bandwidth signal a major leap forward for Apple silicon.

• Apple's 18-core M5 Max outperforms AMD's 96-core Ryzen Threadripper Pro 9995WX in Geekbench 6 multi-thread benchmarks, though experts note the test favors chips with fewer, faster cores and does not scale well beyond 32 threads.
• The M5 Max achieves a single-core score of 4,353 and a multi-core score of 29,644 in Geekbench 6, surpassing its predecessor the M4 Max and even Apple's own 32-core M3 Ultra, thanks to new 'super' performance cores and 614 GB/s of memory bandwidth.
• On the GPU side, the M5 Max scores around 228,081 points in Geekbench 6 GPU compute, beating the GeForce RTX 5070 but falling behind the RTX 5070 Ti and RTX 5090, making its integrated GPU impressive but not class-leading against top discrete graphics cards.