Apple’s 2013 Mac Pro Shows Surprising Performance Chops Against Apple’s M2 Silicon

The Mac Pro from Apple was at once regarded as a technical miracle. The new workstation’s inability to handle demanding workloads and tendency to experience thermal throttling infuriated power users who demanded the highest single-core and multi-core performance possible. Despite these drawbacks, the system with an Intel Xeon CPU may compete with Apple’s current M1 and M2 models.

The Mac Pro was delivered to the residence of a YouTuber with the channel name This Does Not Compete. He paid for a setup with a quad-core Intel Xeon E5 processor, but it was clear that it would never compete with even the smallest Apple Silicon. Fortunately, the user can upgrade the workstation provided they don’t mind spending a lot of time and energy opening it up. However, the YouTuber was able to replace the old CPU with a 12-core Intel Xeon E5-2679 v2.

The producer of the material started a new installation of macOS Monterey and ran Geekbench 5 to put the Mac Pro through its paces. The machine scored 7792, which is more than what the M1 MacBook Pro received in the identical multi-core result, 7390. The single-core score was disappointing, but the multi-core performance saw the most significant improvement.

This shows that an updated Mac Pro, while over a decade old, still has some life. A screenshot of Cinebench is given below to see how the CPU compares to the competition. Tragically, the M2 MacBook Pro outperformed the workstation with a multi-core score of 8743, despite having less power and higher performing cores.

As you can see, the margin is not very large, indicating that you may want to put off your purchase for the time being if you already own one of these “trash can” computers and do not require a product that needs to be away from the wall.