Rosetta 2 Benchmarks Surface From Mac Mini With A12Z Chip

[chucker23n1]

you mean iPad Pro with A12X, not A12Z right?

No. The 2020 iPad Pro and DTK have the same A12Z. The DTK has much more RAM, though.

 

[Mr. Dee]

And you wonder why Apple likes to keep things under wraps?

 

[Biorunner]

Really underwhelming results, makes me wonder if it was the right time for Apple to do this, or maybe they should have waited a few more years for the silicon team to catch up to Intel, or maybe they should have just gone with AMD.

From the article above:

Keep in mind that Geekbench is running through Apple's translation layer Rosetta 2, so an impact on performance is to be expected.

I don't think we can read too much into these results until a native Geekbench test is created.

 

[incoherent_1]

Does anyone think Apple didn’t run these same tests and expect people to eventually publish them?

They’re using an unoptimized, two-year old chip for a reason: they want to keep their actual PC-class chips hidden for now, probably because they’ll wipe the floor with any and all competition and don’t want to give their competitors a head start.

 

[Lobwedgephil]

you mean iPad Pro with A12X, not A12Z right?

No, they mean the iPad Pro released this year with A12Z.

 

[Number 41]

The move away from Intel is a solution in search of a problem to solve.

 

[Rogifan]

1) down-clocked slower than iPad Pro!
2) Running benchmark in rosetta
3) Only using 4 out of 8 cores for some reason
4) not the chip that will be used in macs

These benchmarks mean absolutely nothing.

Doesn’t mean people aren’t going to share them and freak out over them. And all the caveats you mention will be buried in the articles.

 

[Stella]

Apple needs to do better than this for desk top performance. I am a little scared now.

No need to be worried.

These CPUs aren't going to be the ones that we see in the consumer products later on in the year. They are pre-release, for developer purposes and we can't make any conclusions based upon what we see now.

Also, these benchmarks don't reflect the real world.

 

[DribbleCastle]

Apple needs to do better than this for desk top performance. I am a little scared now.

Quick! Buy as many intel Macs as you can. The resale market is going to be huge!

 

[Biorunner]

Apple needs to do better than this for desk top performance. I am a little scared now.

Why are you scared? Geekbench can't possibly run a perfect test on this machine as it's running through Rosetta then Geekbench.

 

[ssamani]

Actually that’s equivalent to a late 2015 iMac 21” which is what I currently have, and once upgraded to an SSD is perfectly usable for home use.

For a machine that’s using a 2 year old iPad chip that is under-clocked, under cored and running beta emulation software that’s ok. That gives me a lot of hope.

This will already be faster using native software.

 

[cmaier]

I'll take your word for it. Just seems along way off for what I heard about this chip. But I'll remain hopeful.

Nobody told you anything about “this chip.” This is a different chip.

 

[midkay]

This actually bodes SO WELL for this transition.

 

[cmaier]

Doesn’t mean people aren’t going to share them and freak out over them. And all the caveats you mention will be buried in the articles.

And that’s just another example of why it sometimes sucks to know better.

 

[Airforcekid]

I thought they weren't allowed to run benchmarks lol just like all these will be returned and not thrown up on eBay. Id love to have one as a collectible myself.

 

[naturalstar]

1) Guess this person doesn’t depend upon income from the App Store.

2) This is NOT the final chip that is going into production. It’s for the DTK only. The benchmarks are irrelevant.

 

[Spock]

I will reserve judgement until production units are benchmarked.

 

[pcdtech]

We all knew that this would happen. However, we also know that the real Apple Silicon Macs will use a completely different chip, no doubt modified and optimised in ways we don't know about yet. While this is interesting (and I'll read all the news articles that come up about this), its going to tell us next to nothing about what's coming.

I'm not doubting you but, rather, just trying to educate myself. Did Apple confirm that they don't intent to launch the prior A12Z chip in future Macs but, instead, a new range that have not been used in the iPad/iPhone?

 

[Infernos]

It's beta software on beta hardware. Adjust your expectations before complaining.

 

[PTLove]

Honestly forget the performance, lets look at the delta between what one would expect and what we get to get a rough idea of Rosetta performance. A 30% performance penalty for Rosetta x86 -> ARM emulation is better than I would have expected. That bodes well for this transition.

 

[cmaier]

I'm not doubting you but, rather, just trying to educate myself. Did Apple confirm that they don't intent to launch the prior A12Z chip in future Macs but, instead, a new range that have not been used in the iPad/iPhone?

YES. They were very very clear about this.

 

[DummyFool]

I think the benchmark scores are good if you take into account all the limitations that have been listed above. It's already close to a Macbook Pro 13. I expect to see big gains when the real ones comes out. Not afraid at all.

 

[ian87w]

Wait, this is under emulation, yet it's already performing close to a current Macbook Pro with an i5!!

 

[lunarworks]

Apple needs to do better than this for desk top performance. I am a little scared now.

Really underwhelming results, makes me wonder if it was the right time for Apple to do this, or maybe they should have waited a few more years for the silicon team to catch up to Intel, or maybe they should have just gone with AMD.

THIS is why Apple didn't want benchmarks out there. FUD is gonna spread like wildfire from these results on what is essentially prototype hardware featuring a chip from an iPad.

 

[ghost187]

30% hit for single core performance is actually efficient for running non native code, I’m impressed unlike everyone here. Also, I have a feeling the 14X/Z or whatever will outperform Intel’s equivalent offerings by more than 30%