Monday, June 29, 2020

Developer Transition Kit Benchmarks

Mike Wuerthele (also: MacRumors):

This Mac mini is outfitted with Apple’s A12Z processor which was originally designed for the 2018 iPad Pro and then reused with the 2020 iPad Pro.

[…]

To get more specific on performance, let’s take a look at Geekbench 5 results. Right now, with Rosetta 2 translation of the benchmark suite, the developer kit with the A12Z Bionic pulls down a score of about 845 for the single-core benchmark and around 2960 for the multi-core tests.

To compare, in the Core i3 Mac mini, we saw Geekbench results of 949 for single-core tests and 3,197 for multi-core test. Benchmarks for the same A12Z Bionic in the iPad Pro put it at 1,118 points for single-core tests, and 4,625 for multi-core.

The DTK is probably a lower bound for the performance we’re likely to see with actual Apple Silicon Macs, so it’s encouraging that running x86 apps in Rosetta is faster than a 2012 iMac or Surface Pro X running native code.

Apple has, in recent years, allowed screenshots and discussions of prerelease OS versions, but the Universal App Quick Start agreement specifically says not to:

(d) display, demonstrate, video, photograph, make any drawings or renderings of, or take any images or measurements of or run any benchmark tests on the Developer Transition Kit (or allow anyone else to do any of the foregoing), unless separately authorized in writing by Apple;

(e) discuss, publicly write about, or post any reactions to or about the Developer Transition Kit (or Your use of the Developer Transition Kit), whether online, in print, in person, or on social media, unless separately authorized in writing by Apple;

My DTK is now in transit, so I’m planning not to write further on this topic.

Previously:

4 Comments RSS · Twitter

Got mine today :-) They were rather quick; 14 hours to respond to the application, 5.2 days from my payment to being delivered at the door.

The 2013 hardware comparison is deeply misleading. The 2019 27" iMac with a top of the line i9-9900K scores 1352 vs. ~830 translated and it has a 50% clock advantage 3.6 vs. 2.4 GHz. And that is against a passively cooled ultra-low voltage part. Emulated!

Apple's own CPUs unshackled from passive cooling and tiny battery voltages are going to be nothing short of revolutionary. Everybody expecting the first "ARM Macs" to be low end Air-style computer are really not skating where the puck is going to be.

Looks like Apple Insider pulled the article.

[…] particularly crazy about this article is that Apple’s DTK had already demonstrated decent performance with Rosetta 2 at time of […]

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