First Benchmarks Surface for Apple's ARM-Based Developer Transition Kit

For comparison, The Intel DTK was a P4, with an Intel GMA900 GPU, shoved in a powermac chassis. It wasn't indicative of the performance of the core duo & xeons they in the first-gen Intel Macs.

The DTK is a minimum viable platform, not a product.

(That's not to say I'm not hellish curious about some Rosetta2 examples that aren't cherry-picked!)

It's at least interesting that it's close-ish to current entry-level MacBook Air performance, even with Geekbench running under Rosetta. Seems like that would indicate that the real chips they'll be using in laptops and desktops will be pretty performant.

It's curious that it's possibly downclocked from the latest iPad Pro, although only a very little bit and that may not even be accurate reporting by GeekBench running in emulation. But of course the Intel mac mini in the same box has the famous pretty large fan. And the DTK still has the large vent opening on the back. So there is probably the same fan assembly in there — a first for an A_ series device.

Apple likely will have a big incentive to try to get the perf of their processors up to comparable levels with Intel as soon as possible. They will compare native ARM64 apps like Photoshop, chrome, etc to the same apps on Intel chips, but I wonder what will be their marketing / explanation for the difference running apps using Rosetta -- like if a particular app that is quite difficult to transition to ARM64 runs quite poorly, do they just say "well its a really hard problem, so please give us some credit for it?" Like it would seem like Apple would want to figure out a way to make the translation code be multicore, so you could take something that thinks its running on a single core and this translation layer would split it up to multicore and then Apple would just add more cores to make the translation layer fast enough. Anybody have any clue if thats possible?

I think they need to do this as there is no support for asymmetric CPU cores on Intel or macOS prior to Apple Silicon.

Do we have numbers to compare with the Snapdragon-based Windows laptops?

edit: we do: https://www.notebookcheck.net/Qualcomm-s-Snapdragon-8cx-amas...

Or you could simply look at the geekbench numbers for the iPad Pro, which uses the same SOC.

That is a promised feature, but for existing published iOS apps it seems like it would rely on the Mac App Store in Big Sur providing iOS apps, and that switch may not have been flipped yet.

You want to examine the individual subscores to make sure it's not just hardware acceleration but it's generally as good a measure as any other, at least with version 5. There were previous versions that had different working set sizes for different platforms and that was a major source of error.

EDIT: In the end the only really good benchmark is your particular workload run on the processor. Everything else is just evidence towards what that'll be.

geekbench is exactly what people refer to when they claim the iPad Pro is just as fast as a MacBook: https://www.macrumors.com/2020/05/12/ipad-pro-vs-macbook-air....

That is what Apple’s chips with ARM instruction set are called. You don’t call AMD chips, Intel chips because they use intel instruction set.

Likewise Apple’s CPUs are not designed by ARM. They are Apple designs licensing ARM instruction set

I think they want to highlight the custom silicon models that they have so far because we are now at the point that probably every product will have its own processor so you need some kind brand of what the goals are of Apple's strategy in the future.

Also, its really good marketing and allows everyone to have the same talking points because if you want to explain the naming scheme of any processor manufacturer it will take longer than the amount of time that anyone has an actually attention span for people not interested in the subject already.

It think they use the naming because their message is that they don’t slap a few random parts together, but optimize a complete design.

Certainly, for many workloads, what matters isn’t the performance of the CPU but how efficiently it can offload those tasks to the GPU and ‘Neural Engine’. Those two parts also might use up the majority of the transistors.

The CPU also _could_ have a few un-ARM-like extensions that help in emulating x86. It may be interesting to watch what gets committed to LLVM.

For the same reason people dont say x86 Macs. And it is not a CPU so you cant say Apple CPU. If you say Apple SoC not everyone knows what is a SoC. Apple Silicon is much easier to understand for vast majority of consumers, and the name includes everything fro CPU, GPU, NPU, Video Encoder. etc.

You may ask what happen when Wafer move away from Silicon.

Apple Silicon is the brand of the chip, like Intel Xeon.

For the same reason they wouldn't call the iPod an "Apple MP3 player" or the iPhone "Apple cell phone"— they're reserving the space for their branding which is not yet solidified.

Pure speculation, but when they switched to "intel" they were effectively locked in, and they couldn't then have some intel and some AMD and some of their own x86 stuff.

Now they're going to "Apple Silicon", it might be ARM this decade and who-knows-what next decade, but it will remain as reliable and fast and blah-blah as "Apple Silicon".

I believe the NDA forbids benchmarking. That doesn't mean it's not going to happen, but it might hurt Geekbench's case for releasing it. Or even receiving a dev unit.

The A12x came out in fall of 2018, so coming up on 2 years

> totally unreliable info, but interesting.

How is this "unreliable"?

Native benchmarks wouldn't be very interesting, since this is the same processor we see in the iPad Pro. What's interesting is how Apple will handle the transition from Intel to ARM, so measuring Rosetta's virtualization capabilities is absolutely what we should be focused on until we actually get access to genuine Apple Silicon desktop chips.