Twenty two Apple Developer Transition Kit benchmark runs have surfaced in the Geekbench online browser, at the time of writing. Average single core and multi core scores in this popular benchmark appear to be about 830 and 2,950, respectively. That score is consistently higher than Microsoft's Surface Pro X, and almost on a par with the Apple iMac 27-inch Retina mid-2017 with Intel Core i5-7600K quad-core processor.
Developer Steve Troughton-Smith had a few words to share about the Apple DTK's performance on his Twitter feed. He was agog with the Surface Pro X comparisons for a number of reasons. Firstly, the Surface Pro X uses a custom Microsoft designed 3GHz Arm processor based on the Qualcomm SQ1 chip, and in these benchmarks it runs an Arm64 build of Geekbench 5. Secondly, the Apple Mac Mini-based DTK runs "a two year old iPad chip" and is tackling the Geekbench x86_64 tests using emulation tech - Apple Rosetta 2.
Another important observation is that the A12Z-based system under test is only utilising half of its eight CPU cores in Geekbench, presumable the big, rather than LITTLE, cores.
For another comparison, Troughton-Smith commented that his workaday iMac (a 2012 Intel Core i7 machine with 4C/8T, and boost to 3.6GHz) is trounced by the quad-core DTK using Rosetta virtualisation. If you think that is too old for a meaningful comparison, a typical contemporary MacBook Air (Early 2020, with Intel Core i5-1030NG7), isn't terribly faster than the DTK: scoring 1,128 and 3,841 in single and multi-core tests, respectively.
Apple DTK OS/processor info - click to zoom
Whichever way you look at this it seems that the upcoming 'Apple Silicon' Macs should work ably, depending upon purpose. Remember that when they do ship, the Intel-outside computers will be based upon new chips designed with the MacOS in mind, derivative of the A14 SoC using a 5-nanometer process. Apple still has time to optimise and refine Rosetta 2, and various performance critical pieces of software to help the performance and efficiency of its Apple Silicon Macs shine.
Apple DTK photos via @TransientEye.
