For a while now, Apple has been producing its own silicon for use in computers. Chips such as the M4 have been powering devices such as the MacBook Air to great acclaim. This only adds to the mystery of why products marked as Mac Pros have appeared on Geekbench that appear to be sporting AMD chips.

Geekbench is a popular free utility for benchmarking the performance of hardware for PCs, laptops, tablets, and smartphones. Once tests are completed, the user can upload their scores to the Geekbench browser, which then provides a huge and comprehensive database detailing the performance of various devices. It also occasionally hosts information that probably shouldn't yet be available to the public.

AMD-based Mac Pro listed on Geekbench

Two Mac Pro entries have appeared on the Geekbench Browser, assumedly from the same machine. Posted just a minute apart, both are labelled simply as ‘MacPro 7,1′. One entry details OpenCL scores, and the other, Metal (Apple’s graphics AI). The specs are where it gets interesting, since AMD hardware is listed, instead of any of Apple's M-class silicon or older Intel chips.

The MacBook was listed as using macOS 14.7.5 (Build 23H527). This in itself is peculiar, since the current version of macOS is version 15, also known as Sequoia; version 14 is otherwise known as Sonoma. Even more strangely, the CPU is listed as an AMD Ryzen 5 5600X, with the graphics device listed as ‘AMD Radeon Pro Duo Compute Engine’.

Looking at Metal benchmark leaderboards, the 49,277 score actually puts it slightly above the Apple M3, which scores an average of 46,296. The OpenCL graphics score, however, is well below average.

We can’t know for sure why these benchmarks have been uploaded to Geekbench. It is possible that this is a mistake, or an unknown user attempting to create what is sometimes called a ‘Hackintosh', but the combination of AMD silicon with the Mac Pro name still raises some eyebrows. For reference, the 2019 Mac Pro comes fitted with an Intel Xeon W processor as standard.

About the Author

Rebecca Hills-Duty

Writing and journalism experience at VRFocus, UploadVR, The Escapist, HTC, PC Gamer, Tech Radar+ and Dexerto. Can sometimes be found playing with retro tech.