Apple Silicon M1 Emulating x86 is Still Faster Than Every Other Mac in Single Core Benchmark

[MacRumors]

The first native benchmarks of Apple's M1 chip appeared on the Geekbench site last week showing impressive native performance. Today, new benchmarks have begun showing up for the M1 chip emulating x86 under Rosetta 2.

Single Core Mac benchmarks​

The new Rosetta 2 Geekbench results uploaded show that the M1 chip running on a MacBook Air with 8GB of RAM has single-core and multi-core scores of 1,313 and 5,888 respectively. Since this version of Geekbench is running through Apple's translation layer Rosetta 2, an impact on performance is to be expected. Rosetta 2 running x86 code appears to be achieving 78%-79% of the performance of native Apple Silicon code.

Despite the impact on performance, the single-core Rosetta 2 score results still outperforms any other Intel Mac, including the 2020 27-inch iMac with Intel Core i9-10910 @ 3.6GHz.

Initial benchmarks for the MacBook Air running M1 natively featured a single-core score of 1,687 and multi-core score of 7,433. Additional benchmarks with M1 have since surfaced and are available on Geekbench.

Meanwhile, a full chart of Geekbench results is available that will let you compare these scores to any other Mac.

Article Link: Apple Silicon M1 Emulating x86 is Still Faster Than Every Other Mac in Single Core Benchmark

 

[omenatarhuri]

Wow, this is a beast.... Real-life benchmarks and reviews will be super exciting to see next week!

 

[Psychicbob]

Bl**dy Hell!!! Does. Not. Compute ...

 

[ridgero]

That’s incredible. Hope they release a Mac with 64 GB RAM soon!

 

[jonnysods]

These are some amazing numbers. Very curious to see the real world stuff and how it shakes down in every day computing. I'm still very excited about the transition!

 

[cmaier]

But what are all the Apple-haters and Me-doubters going to complain about if that’s the case?

Oh, I know. They’ll fall back to “but it doesn’t virtualize x86.”

Anyway, that’s actually more of a Rosetta-speed hit than I expected, but we’ll see when we get real world data.

 

[Acronyc]

I’m looking forward to seeing more real world use cases and tests beyond synthetic benchmarks. The performance of Apple silicon looks rather promising, though, more than I expected.

 

[techguy9]

Apple M1 Macs: Fastest Intel Mac you will ever have.

 

[Girder_Shade]

How the heck is Apple so far ahead in performance? It's incredible how much of a lead they have it's like alien technology.

 

[involuntarheely]

But what are all the Apple-haters and Me-doubters going to complain about if that’s the case?

Oh, I know. They’ll fall back to “but it doesn’t virtualize x86.”

Anyway, that’s actually more of a Rosetta-speed hit than I expected, but we’ll see when we get real world data.

no honestly the only complaint here is in how closed this system is going to become and for seemingly no good reason.
but M1 looks like a legit beast.

 

[LavenderCaptain]

If I was writing something like Rosetta, I probably wouldn’t bother preserving single core execution and instead try to optimize by executing across multi core if possible as part of my dynamic recompile.. Are we sure Rosetta isn’t doing that?

 

[arn]

But what are all the Apple-haters and Me-doubters going to complain about if that’s the case?

Oh, I know. They’ll fall back to “but it doesn’t virtualize x86.”

Anyway, that’s actually more of a Rosetta-speed hit than I expected, but we’ll see when we get real world data.

It's a little better than the numbers for the dev kit. It was about 75% according to those numbers: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/m1-rosetta-performance.2267359/post-29215938

 

[gigapocket1]

What will be interesting to see is how videoapplications and how well does photoshop perform emulated

 

[russell_314]

Wow... This is the future of computers! ❤️

 

[deputy_doofy]

How the heck is Apple so far ahead in performance? It's incredible how much of a lead they have it's like alien technology.

They've been beating the ARM world for years. Android tech has always had "better" tech on paper. More cores. More GHz per core. More RAM. And always lost.

 

[CWallace]

If I was writing something like Rosetta, I probably wouldn’t bother preserving single core execution and instead try to optimize by executing across multi core if possible as part of my dynamic recompile.. Are we sure Rosetta isn’t doing that?

But would the benchmark then report as Single Core, as it the case here?

 

[rowanmmcdonald]

Can’t wait to see the M1X/M1Z coming in the macs due mid year.

My prediction is a good, better, best chips updated each year similar to the A# chips: M1, M1X for mid level, M1Z for Mac Pros, etc.

 

[meme1255]

But what are all the Apple-haters and Me-doubters going to complain about if that’s the case?

Oh, I know. They’ll fall back to “but it doesn’t virtualize x86.”

Anyway, that’s actually more of a Rosetta-speed hit than I expected, but we’ll see when we get real world data.

I'm not a hater. However, the virtualisation is THE dealbreaker for me… And Geekbench is a short-term load, it would be interesting whether the thermal constraints allow sustained load for longer period without significant penalty.

 

[cmaier]

no honestly the only complaint here is in how closed this system is going to become and for seemingly no good reason.
but M1 looks like a legit beast.

How can you say “for seemingly no good reason?”

It’s got way more performance than any of the competition, and two or three times the battery life.

Aren’t those good reasons?

 

[netv]

This is crazy performance. Too bad there's only 16 GB RAM max for now ...

 

[mzeb]

Damn, still need boot camp for some of my games but getting really tempted...

 

[Basilornis]

I’d still be a little wary. Although the silicon appears impressive we dont know how load over time is dealt with. The architecture of the chip is significantly different in comparison to the normal train of thought (when it comes to chip design) that it may possibly be that the some quirk of the m1 layout might make it better at performing with these short workloads. Not saying that the performance isn’t real, just don’t assume because a handful of geek benches show it as powerful that it actually is.
Those who remember the g4/5 days know what I mean. Apple was good at demonstrating superiority that actual users were often unable to reproduce in normal workloads. I’d wait for actual reviews from trusted sources before buying into the hype.

 

[cmaier]

If I was writing something like Rosetta, I probably wouldn’t bother preserving single core execution and instead try to optimize by executing across multi core if possible as part of my dynamic recompile.. Are we sure Rosetta isn’t doing that?

Yes, we are sure.

Parallelizing single threaded code automatically is one of the hardest computer science problems. No way Rosetta is doing that.

 

[CWallace]

How the heck is Apple so far ahead in performance? It's incredible how much of a lead they have it's like alien technology.

Hardware-level code optimization might be playing a supporting role. For example, Reference counted memory management is common in Objective C code: an M1 can perform it every 6 nanoseconds (and 15 in x86 emulation) that an Intel CPU needs 30 nanoseconds to complete.

 

[StellarVixen]

How the heck is Apple so far ahead in performance? It's incredible how much of a lead they have it's like alien technology.

They just realized very early which way to go. If others (AMD, Intel) saw writing on the wall earlier, we would have had competition. This way, it will take years for them to catch up.