From ExtremeTech: Ever since Apple announced the A12Z and its shift away from x86, there’ve been questions about exactly how these ARM chips will perform and what we can expect from them. The first benchmark results are starting to appear from Apple dev kits, and as long as you take them with a mountain of salt, they’re pretty interesting.
What we have to work with here is Geekbench. Geekbench tends to be a very strong test for Apple CPUs, but in this case, we’re talking about Apple CPUs running the x86 version via emulation. Even if Geekbench does favor Apple CPUs more than x86, running the application through an emulator is going to hit performance.
Also, note that the application only reports four cores. The A12Z is nominally an eight-core chip, with four big, four little. It isn’t clear if these dev systems only use the “big” cores, or if the application simply doesn’t detect them properly, or if this is an emulator limitation. Regardless, it’s very early days and these are early results.
Here’s the data as it has come in to Geekbench 5.
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