Apple’s transition to their own custom chipsets has been called “brave” by some, and we have to agree to a certain extent. Intel is pretty much the dominating hardware of choice when it comes to computer processors, with many applications designed for its hardware, so for Apple to launch something new in such an established ecosystem does seem risky.
However, it seems that Mac users might not need to worry all that much because according to new Geekbench 5 Pro benchmarks, it appears that Apple’s custom silicon is holding its own just fine, if not better. The benchmarks are based on the A12Z chipset inside of a custom Mac Mini computer that is running natively, not through Apple’s Rosetta virtualization software.
This means that in theory, it should perform better, and sure has. Based on these benchmarks, the Mac Mini managed to achieve a single-core score of 1,098 and a multi-core score of 4,555. To give you some context, the 2020 entry level MacBook Air powered by Intel scored 1,005 for single-core performance and 2,000 for multi-core.
Of course, benchmarks only tell one part of the story, but this is the part that we’re sure some are concerned about as to whether or not Apple’s custom silicons will be as powerful as Intel’s. Apple is expected to release their first ARM-based Mac computers by the end of the year, so hopefully we’ll have more details then.