Although developers who requested an Apple Developer Transition Kit signed a confidentiality agreement that prevented benchmarking, it appears several have broken this promise and have uploaded their benchmarks onto the Geekbench website.
The Developer Transition Kit, which is available for developers to develop and test their apps ready for Apple’s new Silicon Macs, can be reserved for $500.
At the end of the program, developers must return their Kits back to Apple as part of the agreement, though they are free to use the hardware in the coming months to create new Apple ARM-focused apps.
The first benchmarks suggest that the Apple Silicon chip achieves a score of 800 on the Geekbench v5 single-core test. On the multi-core test, a score of around 2,600 is achieved.
To compare this with other Apple hardware, the latest MacBook Air scores 1005 and 2000 respectively on Geekbench, meaning the new ARM offers comparable performance.
It’s important to note that the Apple Developer Transition Kit is designed exclusively for developers to port existing macOS apps to the Apple Silicon hardware, and therefore the hardware that Apple will ship to consumers will be more powerful than these benchmarks.
Right now, the Apple Developer Transition Kit includes an A12Z chip, which is used by the iPad Pro. It’s expected that ARM Mac laptops and desktops will feature optimized chips, which will offer higher levels of performance and help Apple compete with Intel and others.
Are you excited about Apple’s transition to ARM chips? Let us know your thoughts and check back soon for more news and rumors on everything Apple, as and when we get them.