Apple’s M6-powered Mac mini starts shipping next week and just a couple of days before its made available to the public, the chip has appeared on Geekbench. The benchmark listing shows the M6 scoring 4,610 points in single-core and 20,676 points in multi-core test. Now at a glance, the leaked benchmark test results show that Apple’s new desktop chip is a good step up from the M5 in multi-core performance. But, there is more to this story. The A20 Pro chip inside the iPhone 18 Pro Max has managed a higher single-core score in an earlier Geekbench test. Read on.
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The M6 scored 20,676 points in the multi-core test. That is around 20 percent higher than the median multi-core score of 17,072 recorded for the M5 across five runs.
The result also lines up with Apple’s own claims. The company has said that the M6 can deliver up to 20 percent faster multi-threaded performance compared with the M5. The M6 has 12 CPU cores, split into two super cores, four performance cores and six efficiency cores. The Geekbench listing shows a clock speed of 4.79GHz.
The single-core improvement is smaller. The M6’s score of 4,610 is roughly 10 percent higher than the M5’s median score of 4,195 from the same benchmark version.
Now, to compare these results with those of Apple’s A20 Pro. The chip, which powers the iPhone 18 Pro models, scored 4,725 points in the single-core Geekbench 6 test. That puts it around 2.5 percent ahead of the M6’s 4,610 points.
The A20 Pro also reached a peak clock speed of 4.93GHz in that test, compared with 4.79GHz for the M6.
Now, just to be clear, this does not mean the A20 Pro is faster than the M6 overall. In multi-core testing, the difference is much larger. The A20 Pro scored 12,575 points, while the M6 managed 20,676.
The M6 has twice as many CPU cores as the A20 Pro, along with the thermal headroom of a desktop machine. That gives it a clear advantage when workloads can use multiple cores at the same time.
The single-core result also comes from an early Geekbench listing, so it is too soon to draw any firm conclusions from the small gap. Benchmark results can vary between different machines, and more M6 results should give us a better idea of its typical performance.
The new Mac mini with the M6 is set to go on sale on September 22. In India, the base model starts at Rs 99,900 with 16GB of memory and 256GB of storage.
The M5 Pro version starts at Rs 2,09,900, while the M6 Mac mini starts at $899 in the US.
Apple’s new M6 Mac mini is therefore shaping up to be a solid upgrade for workloads that rely heavily on multiple CPU cores. The early Geekbench result also suggests that the chip is delivering the multi-core gains Apple promised.
As more retail units are tested, we should get a clearer picture of where the M6 stands across different workloads and whether the small single-core gap with the A20 Pro remains.
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