News First Taste of Apple on Arm: macOS Benchmarks Arrive, Sans x86

[Admin]

Benchmarks for Apple's A12Z Bionic processor running macOS 11 Big Sur have started showing up around the time developers began receiving transition kits.

First Taste of Apple on Arm: macOS Benchmarks Arrive, Sans x86 : Read more

 

[joytech22]

That result is pretty good given it is emulating x86, but I feel the performance means if you already own a new-ish Mac/Macbook it might not be worth "upgrading" to the platform just yet - unless all of the popular applications are ported over to ARM natively and perform similar or better.

New buyers or owners of older devices it would matter less, I have a 2013 Macbook Air that I might replace with one, who knows?

 

[DZIrl]

Real test will be when we will be able to compare ARM vs x86 Macs. Here with emulator is too many unknowns.
Software emulator means x86 instruction interpreter, something like BASIC from ages ago and that's quite slow. Simply, even single byte x86 instruction will take multiple ARM instructions to do same job. Now imagine complex ones. Microsoft was not able to emulate x64 code on their ARM Surface. From article info it looks they just recompiled code but if they ran emulator then every other CPU company is finished. But I doubt it.

Do not forget Apple is doing everything to fool users. Watch Linus video about MacAir how Apple already started. Spoiler alert, let's make slow Mac on purpose and then release new one without limitations.

 

[tom111111]

Real test will be when we will be able to compare ARM vs x86 Macs. Here with emulator is too many unknowns.
Software emulator means x86 instruction interpreter, something like BASIC from ages ago and that's quite slow. Simply, even single byte x86 instruction will take multiple ARM instructions to do same job. Now imagine complex ones. Microsoft was not able to emulate x64 code on their ARM Surface. From article info it looks they just recompiled code but if they ran emulator then every other CPU company is finished. But I doubt it.

Do not forget Apple is doing everything to fool users. Watch Linus video about MacAir how Apple already started. Spoiler alert, let's make slow Mac on purpose and then release new one without limitations.

Rosetta is not an emulator. That would be very slow. It translates the machine code.

 

[bit_user]

It's hard to compare this to Windows machines like the Surface Pro X, because Windows 10 on Arm can only emulate the 32-bit version of Geekbench.

Isn't one of the key points about Geekbench that it's cross-platform?

That said, I don't know if it's available for Windows on ARM.

 

[bit_user]

Do not forget Apple is doing everything to fool users. Watch Linus video about MacAir how Apple already started. Spoiler alert, let's make slow Mac on purpose and then release new one without limitations.

It's not users they're probably worried about. I think they're mainly concerned about competitors, which is probably why they put a CPU in it that's essentially a couple years old (A12Z is the same silicon as A12X). Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think A13 already shipped in some iPhones or iPads, months ago.

 

[tom111111]

It's not users they're probably worried about. I think they're mainly concerned about competitors, which is probably why they put a CPU in it that's essentially a couple years old (A12Z is the same silicon as A12X). Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think A13 already shipped in some iPhones or iPads, months ago.

The current iPhone 12 has the A13 SoC.