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Embarrassingly Apple's Two-Year Old ARM Chip Benchmarks Faster Than Microsoft's Surface Pro X

posted by martyb on Wednesday July 01 2020, @05:48AM   Printer-friendly
from the oldie-but-goodie dept.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

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

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 2) by driverless on Wednesday July 01 2020, @01:06PM (3 children)

    by driverless (4770) on Wednesday July 01 2020, @01:06PM (#1014994)

    So the summary is wrong?

    running x86_64 code in emulation faster than the Surface Pro X can run an Arm version natively

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  
    Total Score:   2  

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 01 2020, @05:01PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 01 2020, @05:01PM (#1015067)

    Yes, see the Twitter thread

    • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Wednesday July 01 2020, @06:07PM

      by FatPhil (863) <{pc-soylent} {at} {asdf.fi}> on Wednesday July 01 2020, @06:07PM (#1015099) Homepage
      Apparently the surface is running arm code, and the ipad is emulating x86_64 code.

      Conclusion: the arm-targetting compiler is shit, and the intel-targetting compiler's better?
      It's just as valid a conclusion as "ipad's chip is better than surface's chip" given the available data.

      Having said that, I've worked a fair bit with Arm SoCs, and Apple's were very well designed for speed compared to many.
      --
      Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves

  • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Wednesday July 01 2020, @06:01PM

    by FatPhil (863) <{pc-soylent} {at} {asdf.fi}> on Wednesday July 01 2020, @06:01PM (#1015095) Homepage
    There's definitely something wrong in the summary, as it says both:
    "... than the Surface Pro X can run an Arm version natively.", and
    "... runs x86_64 code, in emulation, faster than the Surface Pro X runs it natively.",
    where "it" should refer to "x86_64 code".

    Blame macrumors, not the eds.
    --
    Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves