While the terms and conditions for Apple's new "Developer Transition Kit" forbid developers from running benchmarks on the modified Mac mini with an A12Z chip, it appears that results are beginning to surface anyhow.
Geekbench results uploaded so far suggest that the A12Z-based Mac mini has average single-core and multi-core scores of 811 and 2,781 respectively. Keep in mind that Geekbench is running through Apple's translation layer Rosetta 2, so an impact on performance is to be expected. Apple also appears to be slightly underclocking the A12Z chip in the Mac mini to 2.4GHz versus nearly 2.5GHz in the latest iPad Pro models.
It's also worth noting that Rosetta 2 appears to only use the A12Z chip's four "performance" cores and not its four "efficiency" cores.
By comparison, iPad Pro models with the A12Z chip have average single-core and multi-core scores of 1,118 and 4,625 respectively. This is native performance, of course, based on Arm architecture.
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Apple needs to do better than this for desk top performance. I am a little scared now.
1) down-clocked slower than iPad Pro! 2) Running benchmark in rosetta 3) Only using 4 out of 8 cores for some reason 4) not the chip that will be used in macs
We all knew that this would happen. However, we also know that the real Apple Silicon Macs will use a completely different chip, no doubt modified and optimised in ways we don't know about yet. While this is interesting (and I'll read all the news articles that come up about this), its going to tell us next to nothing about what's coming.
Why? It's only a developer tool that's not representative of what their real chips will be capable of plus it's going through Rosetta. This is exactly why they didn't show benchmarks at WWDC and why they don't want people running them on these things.
