Mac mini M2 Pro low CPU Frequency : 3.3Ghz instead of 3.5Ghz !

I have essentially the same mini. Latest release of macOS (Sonoma 14.3.1), 32 GB RAM, 1 TB SSD.

Apple states the CPU clock speed as 3.5 GHz. But that alone is a marketing number, because marketing people like simple, round numbers.

Like the idiotic split we have now between actual drive sizes (base 2, a GB is stated as 1024 MB), and rounded down sizes (base 10, a GB is stated as 1000 MB). The latter is a lie. Computers are base 2 devices. Zeros and ones. That's the only way they work. But marketers like round numbers, and they pushed this incorrect sizing for so long it somehow became an acceptable lie.

Anyway, in reality, the clock speed is actually rated at 3.49 GHz. And even that is a fudge since with a mass produced CPU with billions of transistors, it isn't possible to produce them to come out at exactly the same processing level every single time.

I ran Geekbench 6 on my mini, and the CPU measured 3.48 GHz.

I don't know if load has any effect on the measured performance. Try booting into Safe Mode and run Geekbench 6 again just to see if you get a different result.

All the M1, M2 and M3 cores choose their own clock speed, based on your requirements. Each performance core individually will choose one of fifteen different clock speeds. The highest speeds available are 3.228 GHz (M1), 3.49 GHz (M2) and 4.05 GHz (M3).

This means there is no such thing as "the" CPU frequency. An M2 Ultra can have 16 cores running at 15 different clock speeds. Right now I have eight M1 cores running at speeds from 600 MHz to 3,228 GHz. Four of them do very little, the other four run at the top speed about a quarter of the time each - I have one single threaded process running that uses all resources of the CPU, and MacOS switches it between different cores so that one core doesn't heat up too much.

And after stopping that process and doing nothing but typing this message (and about ten apps running in the background), the performance cores do practically nothing, there clock speed is mostly under 1 GHz, and two efficiency cores run at up to 2064 MHz, but only for short times.

Running at the maximum speed if you don't need it would just waste energy and put wear and tear on your Mac without any benefit. You'll really have to put the Mac under pressure to use all its resources. And that is 100% normal.

PS. There is no "Turbo" mode on any M1, M2 or M3 Mac. Every single performance core on every single ARM Mac can be switched to one of 15 clock speeds. The fifteen frequencies are absolutely fixed.

Are you sure its not clock speeds that boost or turbo to 3.5Ghz instead of a standard 3.5Ghz?