AMD Ryzen 7 2700X vs Apple M3 Max 14-Core

AMD Ryzen 7 2700X

The AMD Ryzen 7 2700X is a high-end desktop processor with 8 cores (16 threads) that was announced early 2018. It is based on the revised Zen+ cores and at launch the fastest Ryzen CPU. The CPU cores clock at 3.7 GHz base and using Precision Boost 2 up to 4.3 GHz. All 8 cores and 16 threads can clock up to 4 GHz. The 8 cores are divided in two cluster (4 cores each with own L3 cache) connected via Infinity Fabric.

Compared to the older first Ryzen generation (e.g., Ryzen 5 1700X), the second generation is manufactured in an improved process (12nm called), offers and improved Precision Boost 2 (especially in partial load of the cores) and faster cache and memory speeds.

See our second generation Ryzen review for detailed benchmarks and information.

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).