[ad_1]
Jim salter
The Google Chrome browser is now available as a native Apple M1 app, for those of you who are lucky enough to have M1 Mac Mini, Macbook Air, or Macbook Pro systems. (If you’ve been living under a rock for the past few weeks, the M1 is Apple’s newest in-house designed ARM silicon, which the company began selling in traditional form factor laptops and Mac Minis for the first time this week.)
Google introduces Chrome to download as an x86_64 package or as a native M1 option, which seems a bit strange, as the native M1 version is actually a universal binary, which works on either M1 or traditional Intel Macs. Presumably Google is pushing separate downloads due to the much smaller file size required for the x86_64-only package; the universal binary contains x86_64 and ARM applications and weighs 165MiB versus 96MiB for Intel’s only package.
Performance
-
Speedometer 2.0 is the most prosaic of our three browser benchmarks here: All it does is repeatedly populate a list of menu items, using code from a wide selection of common web development frameworks.
Jim salter
-
Jetstream is the broadest of the three benchmarks shown here; combines a huge number of JavaScript and WebAssembly benchmarks. Workloads include regex parsing, list sorting, ray tracing, and (much, much) more.
Jim salter
-
MotionMark 1.1 is the “oh, brilliant graphics!” reference point. You don’t care at all about the “normal browser stuff”, you just care how many frames per second the various complex animation techniques can render.
Jim salter
In our previous tests, we stated that the older version of Google Chrome, which was available only as an x86_64 binary and needed to run with Rosetta 2, was perfectly fine. That was and is a true statement; We find it hard to believe that anyone using the non-native Chrome binary on an M1 machine will find it “slow”. That being said, Google’s newest ARM native .dmg is out today, and as expected, it’s significantly faster, if you’re doing something complicated enough in your browser to figure it out.
The first benchmark in our gallery above, Speedometer, is the most prosaic – all it does is populate lists of menu items, over and over, using a different web application framework each time. This is probably the most relevant benchmark of the three for “normal web page”, if such a thing exists. The speedometer shows a great advantage for the M1 silicon that runs natively, be it Safari or Chrome; Chrome x86_64 running through Rosetta2 is inconsistently slower than Chrome running on a new HP EliteBook with Ryzen 7 Pro 4750U CPUs.
Jetstream2 is the most comprehensive of the three benchmarks and includes workloads for data classification, regular expression analysis, graphical ray tracing, and more. This is the closest thing to a “traditional” benchmark outside of the browser and is the most relevant for general web applications of all kinds, particularly heavy office applications like spreadsheets with tons of columns, rows and formulas, but also graphic editors with local processing instead of in the cloud. Chrome x86_64 under Rosetta2 takes a significant place in the background of everything else here, although we want to emphasize again that it does. no it feels slow and would work quite well compared to almost any other system.
Finally, MotionMark 1.1 measures complex graphical animation techniques in the browser and nothing else. Safari enjoys an absolutely crushing advantage in this test, more than double even the M1’s native Chrome performance. The prowess of the Apple M1 GPU also has an inordinate impact on these test results, with Chrome native and x86_64 translated on the M1 outperforming Chrome on the HP EliteBook powered by Ryzen 7 Pro 4750U.
