The new Mac mini will be Apple’s fastest desktop Mac, as shown by M4 Pro Geekbench scores

The new Mac mini with M4 Pro will be Apple’s fastest desktop Mac, ever, eclipsing the M2 Ultra performance of Mac Studio and Mac Pro. The base M4 Mac mini will be blazing fast too, but for single core and multi-core, the M4 Pro is the new desktop king (We expect the high-end M4 Max MacBook Pro to handily beat it, of course).

As shown by Geekbench scores appearing overnight, the Mac mini with M4 Pro is reporting single-scores in the 3,700 range and multi-core scores around 22,000. This means the Mac mini will beat the previous multi-core champ, M2 Ultra, on raw CPU performance.

M4 Pro represents a big leap over last year’s M3 Pro, which was a strangely underpowered design tilted towards efficiency cores. The M3 Pro CPU was composed of 6 performance and 6 efficiency cores, whereas the M4 Pro has 10 performance and only 4 efficiency.

As such, the M4 Pro is easily 20% faster on single-core and 45% faster on multi-core than the M3 Pro. (The M3 Pro MacBook Pro achieves scores of about 3100 on single-core and 15,000 on multi-core.) Even compared to the M3 Max, the M4 Pro Mac mini will be about 20% faster on single-core and marginally faster on multi-core.

That means that right now, the Mac mini is the fastest Mac desktop you can buy. Later next year, we expect Apple to debut the M4 Ultra chip for the 2025 Mac Studio and Mac Pro models, which will restore the balance.

As for the base model M4 chip, we knew what to expect as to performance as the chip first debuted in May with the new iPad Pro. Early Geekbench results for the Macs powered by M4 mostly mirror the iPad’s scores, although the Macs seem to have a slightly higher thermal ceiling and can eek out slightly higher numbers as a result.

The new Mac mini and MacBook Pro with M4 and M4 Pro chip are already available to pre-order, and will be released worldwide starting November 8.