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The brand new Apple M1 chip is a true processor miracle and continues to be a hot topic of conversation. Now there is a follow-up.
New Geekbench results show that the 2020 Mac mini with the Apple M1 chip is faster than any Intel Mac, even though the benchmarking application runs under the Rosetta 2 emulator. The new MacBook Air and Pro models were also tested. However, there are some important points to note. writes MacRumors:
Apple M1 chip: The multi-score looks different
The new Rosetta 2 Geekbench results that have been uploaded show that the M1 chip running on a MacBook Air with 8GB of RAM has single-core and multi-core scores of 1,313 and 5,888, respectively. Since this version of Geekbench runs on top of Apple's Rosetta 2, an impact on performance is to be expected. Rosetta 2 running x86 code appears to achieve 78%-79% of the performance of native Apple Silicon code.
Despite the performance impact, Rosetta 2's single-core score still outperforms all other Intel Macs, including the 2020 27-inch iMac with Intel Core i9-10910 @ 3.6 GHz.
These results are truly impressive overall. However, there are three things to note to put the results into context. First, the rankings change significantly when running multi-core tests, where the late 2019 Mac Pro tops the charts and the Mac mini with M1 chip falls behind other Mac Pro models to 13th place. Second, Rosetta 2 is able to achieve impressive speeds for many applications because it is able to fully translate them before execution begins.
Apple M1 chip: The first of its kind
But that doesn't apply to all applications, so things like video encoding will be significantly slower. With Final Cut Pro, that's not a problem, as the program runs natively on M1 devices. With applications like Adobe Premiere Pro, that would still be a problem, at least for now. The third point to note relates to the MacBook Air. The device has a fanless design, which is why it reaches thermal limits under sustained high loads. While it ranks third, this is only true in testing and not in real-world conditions. Nevertheless, the results show that the future of Macs will be quite interesting. After all, the Apple M1 chip is the first of its kind. Have you already discovered the early Black Friday offers on Amazon? It's worth being quick. (Image: Apple)
