The alleged Apple M6 Pro appears with 18 cores and 65% more multi-core performance than the M6

The chip that appears in the benchmark works at 4.78GHzhas 48GB memory and addition 4,150 points in single-core and 37,565 in multi-core. Apple has not confirmed anything about this processor, so the record remains a leak, although the figures coincide strikingly with the architecture that we already know about the M6.

How performance scales against the standard M6

The conventional M6, with 12 cores and 32GB of RAM, scores 4,071 points in single-core and 22,783 in multi-core at the same frequency of 4.78 GHz. The difference in single-core with the leaked Pro model is just one 1.9%something logical if both chips share generation and clock speed.

The jump comes in multi-core: the cores rise by 50%, from 12 to 18, but performance grows by 65%, up to those 37,565 points. The observed scaling thus exceeds the simple quantitative difference between both chips, although that does not mean that all the remaining margin can be attributed to an IPC improvement. Internal configuration would include six core Super and 12 Performancebut Geekbench does not allow us to specify how the load is distributed between them. That pattern, nearly identical per-core performance alongside much more aggressive multi-core capability, is precisely what you'd expect from a Pro variant derived from the same design as the M6, rather than a different chip.

What the caches and frequency point to compared to the M5 Pro

He M5 Pro current, also with 18 cores, yields 3,688 points in single-core and 34,582 in multi-core at 4.60GHz. In front of it, the leaked M6 Pro raises the frequency by only 3.9%, up to 4.78 GHz, but improves a 12.5% in single-core and a 8.6% in multi-core. That mismatch between clock and performance leaves room for architectural changes that simply increasing the frequency alone would not explain.

The caches go in the same direction. The M5 Pro works with 128KB L1 instruction cache and 64KB of data, while the new chip goes up to 160 and 96KBexactly the figures of the conventional M6. A larger L1 cache reduces the need to access slower memory, which would help explain why performance per core remains so close to that of the M6 ​​despite the jump in cores. Geekbench does not always correctly identify the cache configuration of a processor, so this isolated data does not prove anything, but added to the rest of the numbers, it fits better with a new chip than with an M5 Pro with the clock increased.

The future of Pro and Max chips, between cancellation and doubt

The most talked about leaks of mid- 2026 They pointed out that Apple would completely skip the M6 ​​Pro and M6 Max, maintaining the M5 Pro and M5 Max until the arrival of the M7 Pro and M7 Maxscheduled for the end of 2027. Under that schedule, a commercial M6 Pro should not exist, and this record contradicts that roadmap from the start.

However, the information that has subsequently emerged from the supply chain suggests that Apple would not have completely closed the door to a high-performance M6 range. Added to this is that the current versions of macOS still do not show specific identifiers or drivers for the M6 ​​Pro or M6 Max, which could be because the hardware is still in an early phase, because the operating system has not yet added those references, or because the benchmark chip is not finally commercialized. This type of contradictions between different leaks is common in the final phase of a chip's development, when Apple's internal roadmap can still change before an official launch.