If this Apple M5 CPU benchmark leak is anything to go by, the new MacBook Pro is going to fly

• Apple’s M5 has appeared in a benchmark leak with Geekbench
• It posted an impressive single-core result for CPU performance, beating out Qualcomm’s powerful Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme SoC
• The M5 is also shown getting the better of some beefy desktop CPUs, but we need to tread carefully here

If you were wondering how fast Apple’s new M5 chip might be, the answer is pretty nippy indeed, going by the grapevine.

As Tom’s Hardware reports, the M5, which is the engine of the new MacBook Pro 14-inch (and refreshed iPad Pro as well as the Vision Pro), is actually faster than Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme for single-core performance, based on a leaked Geekbench result that Tech Info highlighted on X.

Sprinkle on some seasoning, but as you can see in the above post, the comparison on X is between the MacBook Pro and iPad Pro with M5 chip (10-core), where the laptop wins out – showing the advantages of better cooling and thermals with a notebook chassis. The M5 in the MacBook Pro is shown running at 4.61GHz compared to 4.43GHz in the iPad Pro.

However, what’s more interesting is to take the results for the MacBook Pro 14-inch M5 – 4,263 points in the single-core CPU test, and 17,862 in multi-core – and compare those to other chips.

That’s exactly what Tom’s Hardware did, noting that the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme achieved a single-core score of 4,080 in Qualcomm’s official benchmarks, meaning the M5 beats it by almost 5% here.

Tom’s Hardware also compared the M5’s scores to some mighty desktop PC processors, based on averages for those chips from the Geekbench database (calculated by our sister site), with the following results.

As you can see, the single-core scores are eye-opening to say the least, with the Apple M5 leaving those desktop behemoths in the dust.

Multi-core performance is very different, though, and before we get too carried away, let’s dig into the weeds a bit with these comparisons.

Analysis: getting the better of the Elite Extreme – sort of

First off, we must be cautious about any leaked benchmark, and further remember that this is only one benchmark, and moreover, just a single result for the M5 – so not a representative average like the scores for the desktop CPUs Tom’s compares to Apple’s new SoC.

For example, if we look at the fastest score on the single-core Geekbench test for Intel‘s Core Ultra 9 285K (as opposed to the average), it’s 4,306 – so just a touch faster than the M5. Still, it’s mightily impressive for the M5 to be almost matching this flagship Intel processor; there’s no doubting that.

As for multi-core, the M5 lags behind the big desktop players by 20% to 30%, but those processors have a far bigger core count than 10-cores, of course. The Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme also defeats the M5 in multi-core, hitting 23,491, so it’s 30% faster here (but don’t forget that chip has 18-cores).

Still, all in all, there’s no denying that based on this glimpse of M5 performance – and it is just a fleeting glimpse, and only a leak – Apple seems to have again hit a winner with its own SoCs.

And of course, beefier models of the M5 are still to come with more cores and better multi-core performance – there’s going to be some excitement around the revelation of the M5 Pro and Max.

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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).