Apple M3 Max 14-Core vs AMD Ryzen 5 7600X

Apple M3 Max 14-Core

The Apple M3 Max 14 core CPU is a system on a chip (SoC) from Apple for notebooks that was introduced towards the end of 2023. It integrates a new 14-core CPU with 10 performance cores with up to 4.06 GHz and 4 efficiency cores with 2.8 GHz. There is also a more powerful 16-core variant with 40 GPU cores.

Thanks to the higher clock rates and architectural improvements, the processor performance is also significantly better than the M2 Max in benchmarks and can keep up with the fastest mobile CPUs.

The M3 also integrates a new graphics card with dynamic caching, mesh shading and ray tracing acceleration via hardware. In the cheaper model, 30 of the chip's 40 cores are used and support up to 5 displays simultaneously (internal and 4 external).

GPU and CPU can jointly access the shared memory on the package (unified memory). This is available in 36 and 96 GB variants and offers 400 GB/s maximum bandwidth (512 bit bus).

The integrated 16-core Neural Engine has also been revised and now offers 18 TOPS peak performance (compared to 15.8 TOPS in the M2 but 35 TOPS in the new A17 Pro). The video engine now also supports AV1 decoding in hardware. H.264, HEVC and ProRes (RAW) can still be decoded and encoded. Like its predecessor, the Max chip offers two video engines and can therefore encode and decode two streams simultaneously.

Unfortunately, the integrated WLAN only continues to support WiFi 6E (no WiFi 7), unlike the small M3 SoC thunderbolt 4 is also supported (max 40 Gbit/s).

The chip is manufactured in the current 3nm process (N3B) at TSMC and contains 92 billion transistors (+37% vs. Apple M2 Max).

AMD Ryzen 5 7600X

The AMD Ryzen 5 7600X is a fast mid-range desktop processor of the Raphael series. It offers 6 cores based on the Zen 4 architecture that supports hyperthreading (12 threads). The cores clock from 4.7 (base) up to 5.7 GHz (single core boost). When all 6 cores are fully loaded, 5.3 GHz is the max. clock speed. 

The performance of the R5 7600X is clearly better than the old Ryzen 5 5600X thanks to the improved architecture and modern 5nm process. The single core performance is very good thanks to the high turbo clock speed (-400 MHz compared to the high end CPUs like the Ryzen 9 7950X). The multi-threaded performance is of course not that competitive due to only 6 cores.

The Raphael series still uses a chiplet design with two CCD-clusters (each with 8 possible cores) in 5nm and an IO-die (including the memory controller and the Radeon Graphics iGPU) in 6nm.

The R5 7600X is rated 105 Watt TDP and Raphael is rather power hungry compared to the 5000 series.