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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.
 
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.
 
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.
 
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.
 
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.
 
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?
 
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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.
 
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.
 
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