MacBook Air Powered By M1 Is Faster Than Every Mac Model in Single-Core Tests

We are all aware of the performance drop that Apple Macs suffer from when they run x86 emulations using Apple’s translation layer, Rosetta 2, but things are different with the M1 MacBook Air. As the latest benchmarks show, the M1 beats all other Macs in the single-core department when running the x86 emulation.

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The previous benchmarks also showed that M1 MacBook Air easily outperforms the 16-inch MacBook Pro featuring an Intel 8-core Core i9 chip. Moreover, it also outperformed Apple’s $5,000 base 2019 iMac Pro in a single-core score while it was only 8.5 percent slower in multi-core test scores. This proves that Apple’s 5nm M1 Chip can deliver exceptional performance when needed and can sustain it when running through Rosetta 2.

Since a performance drop is always observed when any Mac emulates x86 hence the previous scores are also included for comparison.

M1 MacBook Air (emulating x86 under Rosetta 2)
Single-core results- 1687
Multi-core results- 7433

M1 MacBook Air
Single-core results- 1313
Multi-core results- 5888

A 21-22% performance drop is observed due to the emulation, but even if you compare these dropped performance scores with the other Mac models released, you may notice that the M1 MacBook Air beats each one of them, which is impressive. You should also consider the fact that the M1 MacBook Air features a fanless cooling design while the M1 MacBook Pro and M1 Mac mini feature an active cooling solution. The remaining new Mac models’ results might be different; hence, it will be interesting to see how they perform under the same situation.

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Due to these results, we are also excited about the 5nm A14T chipset, which will be reportedly featured in the upcoming iMac. Rumors say that it is desktop-class silicon, making us excited to see how it performs upon its release next year.

Via Geekbench