Apple MacBook Air With M3 SoC Seems to Be 20 Percent More Powerful Compared to M2 MacBook Air, Benchmarks Show

Apple on Monday introduced new 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Air models that support the company’s M3 chipset. The 3nm processor is the biggest upgrade in the revised series and Apple claims the new laptops are 60 percent faster than MacBook Air models with M1 chips. However, here are the GeekBench results for the tech giant’s latest offerings. Benchmarks show significant improvements of 20 percent over the M2 and 30-40 percent over the M1, but not as much as Apple claims.

According to the results shared by GeekBench, the MacBook Air with the M3 chipset scored 3134 points in the single-core test and 12048 points in the multi-core test. What is noteworthy is that this processor has an octa-core CPU and a 10-core GPU with a clock speed of 4.05 GHz. If you don’t care about performance, you might not care that much about benchmark results. However, the comparison with Apple’s older chips shows how powerful the latest generation of laptops are.

According to the GeekBench comparison, the MacBook Air 2024 model performed 18 percent better in the single-core test than the 15-inch MacBook Air 2023 with M2 chipset. In multi-core performance, the difference was 20%. Compared to the M1 MacBook Air, which was released in 2020, the performance difference is even greater. In the single-core tests, the latest generation of Apple laptops performed 31 percent better than the M1 laptops, and in the multi-core tests the performance difference was even greater. Production was 37%.

He also pointed out that while the GPU in the M3 chipset has been significantly improved, GeekBench has not tested GPU performance. Even though benchmark tests are run over a short period of time, they can get even better over longer periods of time. Taking both factors into account, Apple’s estimate that the M3 MacBook Air is 60 percent faster than its M1 counterpart could be possible. However, there is no way to say for sure.

Both the 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Air models feature a Liquid Retina display with a resolution of 2560 x 1664 pixels and a maximum brightness of 500 nits. This laptop comes with 16GB RAM and can be upgraded to 24GB RAM. It also has up to 512GB of internal SSD storage, configurable up to 2TB. The new MacBook Air models also feature a MagSafe 3 charging port, a 3.5mm headphone jack, and two Thunderbolt/USB 4 ports for more.