Apple last month delivered to developers deserving a palette or two of his Developer Transition Kit (DTK), a computer unlike any other since under its Mac mini chassis, hides the chip of the iPad Pro, namely an A12Z. Obviously, we wonder about the power of this Mac Frankenstein, and at the end of June we had a first idea of the performance of the machine: the first Geekbench scores announce a computer at the MacBook Air.
Not bad, but could do better since this result is obtained through Rosetta 2, the mill which translates the code of Intel apps in real time so that they work correctly on a macOS Big Sur running under Apple Silicon. Last month, the Geekbench app passed through the Rosetta 2 filter. A new performance test, this time carried out by running Geekbench 5 Pro “native” (by restarting on the recovery partition and by disabling software security ), gives an even more impressive result.
The benchmark gives 1,098 in solo-core test, and 4,555 in multi-core. Figures to be compared with the bench performed using Rosetta 2 (800 and 2,600 respectively). Results very similar to those of an iPad Pro 2020 (and 2018, the A12Z being an A12X having activated a sleeping heart). The Compute test, which measures graphics capabilities, shows a score of 12,610, against 10,500 with Rosetta 2. This is 2,000 points more than the 2020 iPad Pro: everything suggests that Apple has beefed up the game DTK chart.
These benchmarks place the DTK in the same waters as a 2019 iMac (Core i5 @ 3 GHz) with scores around 1,100 and 4,800, or a 2018 15-inch MacBook Pro (Core i7 @ 2.6 GHz) which is 1000 and 5000… Keep in mind that the DTK is a machine intended for developers and that it is not (necessarily) representative of the first general public Macs equipped with an Apple Silicon chip which will be released at the end of the year. Despite everything, it’s hard not to hope that they can do even better with chips newer than the A12Z.
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