At Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) 2020, Apple announced that its planning to move away from using Intel chips in its Macs to using custom ARM based Apple silicon. However, the company did not yet release a consumer Mac equipped with an ARM based chip.
During the keynote, at its annual developers conference, Apple CEO Tim Cook said that the company will launch its first Apple silicon powered Mac by the end of this year. While consumers will not be able to get their hands on any Macs powered by Apple chips for a while, the company has released a Developer Transition Kit (DTK) for developers.
The DTK is powered by Apple’s A12Z processor which is also found in Apple’s iPad Pro. In a new report, a developer on Twitter pointed out that the Apple A12Z processor which runs most apps in emulation on the DTK at the moment beats Microsoft’s SQ1 chip which runs apps natively found in the Surface Pro X.
Apple A12Z chip is basically a two year old A12X chip with an extra GPU core unlocked. It is also important to note that the DTK provided by Apple for developers is just a test machine and its benchmarks scores will very likely be very low compared to the actual results we will see from the upcoming consumer versions of the Apple silicon.
Geekbench scores, reported by few Apple developers, show that the Apple A12Z chips scores 811 on an average for the single core performance and 2,871 on average for the multi core performance. Comparatively, the Surface Pro X’s SQ1 chip scored 726 on single core performance and 2,831 on multi core performance.
The DTK’s Apple A12Z chip clearly beats the Microsoft Surface Pro X’s SQ1 in both single core performance and multi core performance.