Just How Fast Is Apple Silicon?

Can you say, “Ludicrous Speed”?

At WWDC 2020 Apple officially announced what everyone in the industry already knew: that Apple is transitioning the Mac from “Intel Inside” to “Apple Silicon”.

With “Apple Silicon” being the new marketing term for a new generation of processors based on the existing A-series of ARM-based chips that power everything from the iPhone to the iPad to the Apple TV and Apple Watch.

But just how fast is Apple Silicon?

GeekBench

Well, one way of measuring performance is GeekBench 5, which runs a series of benchmarked algorithms on a variety of hardware and which gives a variety of results like single-core performance, multi-core performance, and so on.

The A12Z is an 8-core chip running at 2.48GHz and powers their newest 4th Generation iPad Pro. Let’s look at the performance:

Single Core Performance: 1118, Multi-Core Performance: 4625

These numbers are a bit meaningless by themselves, so let’s compare them to the Geekbench 5 result for a 2020 MacBook Pro 13 model with a 4-core Intel Core i7–1068NG7 and 16 GB of RAM.

Single Core Performance: 1260, Multi-Core Performance: 4676