1. Cinebench R23 doesn't light up all of the vector units of the M1's cores, as its CPU renderer is Intel Embree which is specifically optimized for Intel's AVX2 SIMD with a weak port to the ARM NEON SIMD. In independent testing it's been discovered that the M1 only draws 3.8W per P-core core when running Cinebench, which is 35% less than what it should draw at minimum (5-6.5W). So you should add <b>at least</b> 35% more on top of the score you got, which would put it on top of the i9-12900K. And that's just for core-bound scenarios. When you also factor in memory-bound scenarios, because the memory bandwidth the M1 Ultra's CPU has access to is more than 10x higher than what the i9-12900K has access to with DDR5 memory, as Apple's VP Johny Srouji also pointed out, it should be <b>a lot</b> faster overall than the 12900K.<br><br>2. also GB5 Compute doesn't let the M1 series' GPUs past the M1 Pro reach their highest frequency points, the tests that are done back to back on GB5 Compute are done before the M1 Pro and above ramp up to the highest clock speed targets. So that's a moot comparison too.<br><br>3. The Cycle renderer's Metal backend for Blender isn't that well optimized <b>at all</b> yet on Apple Silicon (or on other Macs w/ AMD &amp; Intel iGPUs for that matter). An Apple engineer working on the Apple Silicon port of Blender said that they're taking their time to ensure that the Metal backend is fully baked and the architecture of Apple's chips is fully taken advantage of. He said they're making use of Unified Memory to avoid duplication of resources for the CPU &amp; GPU to work on, but that there's still a lot of work to be done on that front. Not to mention Apple's TBDR (Tile Based Deferred Rendering) pipeline and all of the optimizations that could take place there. He also said they're even planning to use the Neural Engine for denoising in the viewport. So there's still a lot to look forward to with Apple's collab with Blender and the numbers that we're getting right now are FAR from being representative of the actual hardware. I mean, you wouldn't expect that considering a 3090 right now is like 10x faster than the M1 Ultra 64-core, anyone who believes that that is the case and the raw performance of them are that far apart (esp. considering Apple hasn't been the company to exaggerate their numbers in the past and they claimed at the keynote that they have comparable performance to the 3090) is a child.<br><br>4. This is just day 1 of the Mac Studio w/ M1 Ultra being released to the public. I'm pretty confident that there are a lot of optimizations from developers to come within a couple of weeks. Apple did say "apps will automatically be able to take advantage of the hardware without any additional work", but even for the M1 Pro and Max, which are just monolithic chips, developers had to seed a lot of new versions with carious optimizations in their software to be able to take advantage of the hardware. And this is a chip that is actually two chips bonded together, so...