Xcode build benchmarks by Mac chip
XcodeBenchmark is a community project that times how long a Mac takes to compile one fixed, deliberately heavy iOS project — a clean Release build of around seventy popular open-source dependencies. Because everyone builds the same code, the wall-clock time in seconds is a clean, apples-to-apples measure of raw compile throughput. Lower is faster.
The chart below ranks every Mac chip in the project’s results from quickest to slowest. Hover, tap or use the arrow keys to read off any chip’s build time, core count and memory, and how it compares with the fastest machine.
Build time in seconds (lower is faster). Each bar is the fastest community-reported run for that chip; coloured by chip family. Showing Xcode 26, the current release, with the newest M5 silicon (and an iPhone A18 Pro for fun). Switch to Xcode 16 for the older, wider line-up — times are only comparable within one Xcode version.
What the chart shows
- The Ultra chips lead. Apple’s biggest desktop silicon — the M3 Ultra and M2 Ultra in the Mac Studio — finishes the build in a little over a minute, helped by their huge core counts.
- Max and Pro laptops are right behind. An M4 Max or M4 Pro MacBook Pro lands within striking distance of the desktops, which is why they’re such popular developer machines.
- Each generation moves the floor. Line up the base chips — M1, M2, M3, M4 8–10‑core — and you can watch Apple shave seconds off the same workload year after year.
- RAM matters less than you’d think. Once a machine has enough memory to hold the build, extra gigabytes barely move the number; core count and chip generation dominate.
- The Intel tail. The old Intel Macs sit far to the right — the quad-core i7 takes more than fifteen times as long as an M3 Ultra, a vivid illustration of why the Apple Silicon transition mattered so much to developers.
A note on reading these numbers
The benchmark’s results are crowd-sourced, so each chip can have many submissions; the bar here uses the fastest reported run, which is the cleanest signal of what the silicon can do under good conditions. Newer versions of Xcode compile the same project at different speeds, so figures from different Xcode releases aren’t directly comparable — which is why the toggle keeps Xcode 16 and Xcode 26 as separate views rather than mixing them. Xcode 26 is the up-to-date view and now spans almost every Mac chip Apple has shipped — base M1 through the M5 family, the M3 Pro and Max, and the M3 Ultra — plus, as a curiosity, an iPhone’s A18 Pro that someone coaxed into running the build. The only chips it still lacks are the two nobody has re-run cleanly on Xcode 26 yet — the base M2 and base M3 — which is why Xcode 16 stays around: it carries those, and the whole Intel tail besides.
Sources
- XcodeBenchmark by Maxim Eremenko — the benchmark project and its community results table.