New benchmarks have been leaked for Apple’s Mac Mini Developer Transition Kit based on Apple’s ARM-based chips, hinting at performance to come.
The new Geekbench 5 benchmarks were discovered by 9to5Mac and feature a Bionic A12Z chip, which powers the Developer Transition Kit, delivering a multi-core score of 4,555 and a single-core score of 1,098.
Unsurprisingly, that’s on par with the iPad Pro 2020, which also uses the same chip. And Geekbench 5 even records the result as one of an iPad Pro. But the mention of 16 GB of memory shows us that it is actually the result of the Mac mini test kit; The latest iPad Pro has 6GB of memory.
While the benchmarks are on par with the iPad Pro, they are the first of the blocks that show what performance can be offered when Geekbench 5 is natively applied to the Developer Transition Kit. Previous leaked results were delivered using virtualization through Apple’s Rosetta 2 emulator, which can corrupt overall performance results.
Running Geekbench 5 natively on Apple’s ARM-based chips offers more impressive results and gives us an idea of the kind of performance we can expect from macOS running on Apple Silicon, the initiative Cupertino used to transfer its machines. Mac from Intel processors to your own custom chips.
Compared to a 13-inch MacBook Pro with an Intel Core i5 chip, which scores Geekbench 5 of 4,296 in the multi-core test and 1,107 in single-core results, the ARM-based Mac mini achieves a competitive result.
And it’s worth noting that the Developer Transition Kit is simply a tool to help developers transfer their applications from the x86 architecture to the ARM RISC architecture, so you’re using a standard Bionic A12Z chip system. When Mac machines arrive with the first true Apple Silicon chips, we hope to see more powerful chips that can take advantage of the increased power consumption and space of a MacBok Pro, for example.
The first Apple Silicon Mac machines are expected to have 12 cores, eight of which will be for performance, while four will take care of powering less demanding applications, as well as a custom GPU on the chip. If developers can ensure that their applications run effectively on the ARM architecture, then we might be looking for powerful MacBooks and iMacs that are no longer reliant on Intel chips to deliver impressive performance.
The first Apple Silicon machines are expected this year, probably in the form of a new MacBook Pro. And much more is expected in 2021. Apple’s iPhone 12 could be an exciting phone, but Apple Silicon could be the most important thing to come out of Cupertino. this year.
