A benchmark test published on Tuesday shows a massive performance gap between Mac computers powered by Apple’s M1 chip and Windows on ARM machines running the latest 64-bit x86 apps via an official emulator.
Conducted by PCWorld, the evaluation pits a Microsoft Surface Pro X against the new M1 MacBook Air, two devices that incorporate ARM processors.
As noted by the publication, there are precious few ARM-based Windows boxes from which to choose as only two chips — Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8cx and Snapdragon 8cx Gen 2 — power the platform. Microsoft’s derivative SQ1 and SQ2 processors, designed in partnership with Qualcomm, are in the Surface Pro X.
PCWorld’s Windows testbed relied on a first-generation SQ1, though any gains derived from the more recent SQ2 are thought to be insignificant.
The MacBook Air crushed the Surface Pro X in both single- and multi-score Geekbench 5 testing. Apple’s new laptop scored 1730 points in the single-core process, beating Surface’s score by just over 1000 points. Multi-core testing revealed an even larger disparity, with MacBook Air clocking 7454 points to Surface’s 2734 points.