Updated July 27. Article originally posted July 25.
The Mac’s move to ARM is an exciting one for Apple, but it is one with some major problems along the way. One of the biggest problems is the existing user base of Intel machines. Apple needs to retain support for the Intel platform. And that’s going to lead to an awkward few years with some substantial issues around every corner on the path to ARM.
Air vents are shown on Apple Inc.’s new MacBook Pro, with retina display, in an arranged photograph … [+] in San Francisco, California, U.S., on Monday, June 11, 2012. Apple is releasing a fresh lineup of computers and software tools to woo consumers and keep developers making applications amid accelerating rivalry from Google Inc., Microsoft Corp. and, now, Facebook Inc. Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg
July 27 update: The move to ARM offers Apple many advantages, but one of the key areas it believes it can leverage is the performance of ARM over Intel. The latest benchmarking figures bear that out. Chance Miller reports:
“New benchmarks have leaked today that show the Developer Transition Kit running Geekbench 5 Pro natively on the Mac mini…
“The results show a single-core score of 1098 and a multi-core score of 4555. This compares to the non-native of 800 on the single-core test and 2600 on multi-core. For comparison, the entry-level $999 2020 MacBook Air achieves a Geekbench score of 1005 on single-core and 2000 on multi-core.”
This is an improvement on the initial Geekbench results, where the Mac mini based Developer Transition Kit was using a virtual machine to run the benchmarking app. These numbers, from a native a