MacBook Air with the new M1 processor has been spotted on Geekbench and it outperforms the 16-inch MacBook Pro with Intel Core i9 processor. Apple recently refreshed its Mac mini, MacBook Pro 13-inch, and MacBook Air with its in-house M1 processor, replacing the Intel processors as the company earlier announced it will. Now, MacBook Air with the new M1 chip has made its way to Geekbench and is seemingly outperforming all other CPUs, at least in the single-core scores.
The Geekbench listing comes with the name ‘MacBook Air 10,1′ and has the ‘Apple Silicon’ processor. The laptop has 8GB of RAM and runs macOS 11.0.1. It posted a single-core score of 1,687 and a multi-core score of 7,433. The listing also reveals a base frequency of 3.2GHz that is significantly higher than the base clock speed of 2.3GHz of the Intel Core i9-9880H processor found in the 16-inch MacBook Pro.
Looking at the processor leaderboard on Geekbench, the eight-core M1 processor outperforms much higher core count processors in single-score benchmarks. The top performing processor in the leaderboard is the AMD Ryzen 9 5950X with 16 cores and it has a single-core score of 1,628 – much lesser than Apple’s M1. Next is AMD Ryzen 7 5800X with eight cores and a single-core score of 1,625. Interestingly, MacBook Air with the M1 processor also comfortably beat the top of the line 16-inch MacBook Pro with the Intel Core i9-9880H processor, both in terms of single-core (1,029) and multi-core (6,012) scores.
This already significant lead in performance is even more surprising when you consider that the MacBook Air is fanless, meaning there is no active cooling unlike the 16-inch MacBook Pro. All the heat generated by the processor and other components in the M1-powered MacBook Air is passively cooled. It should also be noted that the base MacBook Air model with 8GB of RAM outperformed the top-end model of the 16-inch MacBook Pro.
The same processor is also present in the refreshed 13-inch MacBook Pro that does have a fan, and may offer even better performance compared to MacBook Air, especially in terms of longer sustained load operations. It’s safe to say that Apple has been able to achieve something quite impressive with its new M1 processor and the new laptops can easily outperform the previous generation offerings at the same price.
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