The first benchmark scores of the Apple Mac mini Developer Transition Kit with the A12Z Bionic processor based on ARM and with macOS 11 Big Sur as the operating system have appeared online. It involves Geekbench results via emulation.
Several developers who already received an Apple Mac mini Developer Transition Kit announced last week have run Geekbench on the Mac mini with A12Z Bionic. The scores average 811 and 2781 points for the singlecore and multicore tests respectively, MacRumors notes.
The scores were achieved with Geekbench 5.2.0 for macOS x86. That means the tool was running in the Rosetta 2 emulator. It can also be seen that only four cores are used, while the soc has eight. Judging by the clock speed, only the powerful cores are used. The latest iPad Pro models, which have the same A12Z soc, get about 1113 and 4699 points in Geekbench under iPadOS for the singlecore and multicore tests respectively. All eight cores are used.
Due to the difference in the number of cores used, it is not clear exactly what the effect of the emulation on the performance is. With the Surface Pro X, Microsoft’s Windows 10 tablet with ARM soc, the difference between running Geekbench via x86 emulation and native is about 60 to 70 percent.
Geekbench is a cross-platform synthetic benchmarking tool that tests performance in areas such as compression and HTML parsing, floating point calculations and cryptography. The A12Z soc of the Apple Mac mini Developer Transition Kit is also included in the current iPad Pro. The A12Z has an extra GPU core enabled compared to the A12X of the iPad Pro from 2018, but is otherwise identical to that chip. The soc has four powerful Vortex and four frugal Tempest cores. In the devkit of the Mac mini, Apple combines the soc with 16GB of memory. Geekbench reports a clock speed of 2.4GHz, which is lower than the clock speed of 2.49GHz that the soc has on iPad Pro models.
Apple will not deploy the A12Z for its first Mac systems with consumer ARM socs. It is rumored that upcoming MacBook Pro models and an iMac will use ARM soc with twelve cores, made up of eight powerful and four energy-efficient cores, based on the A14 soc for the upcoming iPhones.