Apple's A12Z Under Rosetta Outperforms Microsoft's Native Arm-Based Surface Pro X
Apple's Developer Transition Kit equipped with an A12Z iPad Pro chip began arriving in the hands of developers this morning to help them get their apps ready for Macs running Apple Silicon, and though forbidden, the first thing some developers did was benchmark the machine.
Multiple Geekbench results have indicated that the Developer Transition Kit, which is a Mac mini with an iPad Pro chip, features average single-core and multi-core scores of 811 and 2,871, respectively.
As developer Steve Troughton-Smith points out, the two-year-old A12Z in the Mac mini outperforms Microsoft's Arm-based Surface Pro X in Geekbench performance, running x86_64 code in emulation faster than the Surface Pro X can run an Arm version natively.
So the DTK with a two year old iPad chip runs x86_64 code, in emulation, faster than the Surface Pro X runs it natively 😅 Oh boy Qualcomm, what are you even doing? https://t.co/UAlZiwSsF8 — Steve Troughton-Smith (@stroughtonsmith) June 29, 2020
(Score: 5, Insightful) by takyon on Wednesday July 01 2020, @10:43AM (1 child)
Higher performance (at no increase in power consumption) can lead to higher battery life. If a task is completed in less time, the device goes back to idling that much sooner.
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(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 02 2020, @12:52PM
Agreed.
But also, CPU performance does matter. My wife has a $400 Acer (or maybe Asus? I don't remember) Chromebook and web pages that pop up instantly on my mid-range desktop take at least 5 seconds longer to load on the Chromebook. My kids' school district supplies $200 Dell Chromebooks, and they're even slower. If the low end Chromebooks were the only computing device in the house, I probably wouldn't care because I wouldn't know what I'm missing. But if you spend two weeks on the desktop and then switch to the Chromebook you will lose your mind in frustration over all of the delays.
I don't have a personal laptop right now. I wouldn't get a Chromebook because I'm not a fan of Google. But if I was to buy a laptop, even though I wouldn't plan to game on it I would get something with an NVMe SSD and a pretty fast processor, battery life be damned.