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News1 min read·2026-09-21

Apple's new flagship desktop benchmarks roughly 30 percent faster than last generation

The M5 Ultra Mac Studio tests about 30 percent faster than a similarly configured M3 Ultra, but AI workloads remain unverified.

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2026-09-21 21:00 GMT+8

The M5 Ultra Mac Studio starts shipping today. The top configuration has a 36-core CPU, 80-core GPU, 256GB of RAM and 4TB of storage, priced at $12,299.

The Verge compared it against a similarly configured M3 Ultra: roughly 30 percent faster in both single-core and multicore synthetic CPU tests, 63 percent higher in the Cinebench GPU rendering test, with a 4K video export finishing in about 40 seconds. Storage read and write speeds also far exceed last generation.

The reviewer had the machine for only a few days and has not seriously tested AI or local LLM workloads; Apple's AI claims have no independent verification. These figures are a media outlet's own synthetic benchmarks and do not represent real inference performance.

Sources

  • theverge.comOriginal source↗
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