Apple Silicon M1 Emulating x86 is Still Faster Than Every Other Mac in Single Core Benchmark

The first native benchmarks of Apple's M1 chip appeared on the Geekbench site last week showing impressive native performance. Today, new benchmarks have begun showing up for the M1 chip emulating x86 under Rosetta 2.

rosetta 2 m1 benchmark single core

Single Core Mac benchmarks

The new Rosetta 2 Geekbench results uploaded show that the ‌M1‌ chip running on a MacBook Air with 8GB of RAM has single-core and multi-core scores of 1,313 and 5,888 respectively. Since this version of Geekbench is running through Apple's translation layer Rosetta 2, an impact on performance is to be expected. Rosetta 2 running x86 code appears to be achieving 78%-79% of the performance of native Apple Silicon code.

Despite the impact on performance, the single-core Rosetta 2 score results still outperforms any other Intel Mac, including the 2020 27-inch iMac with Intel Core i9-10910 @ 3.6GHz.

Initial benchmarks for the ‌MacBook Air‌ running ‌M1‌ natively featured a single-core score of 1,687 and multi-core score of 7,433. Additional benchmarks with ‌M1‌ have since surfaced and are available on Geekbench.

Meanwhile, a full chart of Geekbench results is available that will let you compare these scores to any other Mac.

Related Roundups: MacBook Air, Mac mini
Related Forums: MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, Mac mini

Popular Stories

iPhone 17 Pro in Hand Feature Lowgo

iPhone 17 Pro Coming Soon With These 14 New Features

Friday July 4, 2025 1:05 pm PDT by
Apple's next-generation iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max are just over two months away, and there are plenty of rumors about the devices. Below, we recap key changes rumored for the iPhone 17 Pro models. Latest Rumors These rumors surfaced in June and July:Apple logo repositioned: Apple's logo may have a lower position on the back of the iPhone 17 Pro models, compared to previous...
iphone 16 pro models 1

Here's How the iPhone 17 Pro Max Will Compare to the iPhone 17 Pro

Saturday July 5, 2025 1:00 pm PDT by
Apple should unveil the iPhone 17 series in September, and there might be one bigger difference between the Pro and Pro Max models this year. As always, the Pro Max model will be larger than the Pro model:iPhone 17 Pro: 6.3-inch display iPhone 17 Pro Max: 6.9-inch displayGiven the Pro Max is physically larger than the Pro, it has more internal space, allowing for a larger battery and...
airpods pro 2

AirPods Pro 3 to Help Maintain Apple's Place in Earbud Market Amid Increasing Low-Cost Competition

Thursday July 3, 2025 7:25 am PDT by
Apple's position as the dominant force in the global true wireless stereo (TWS) earbud market is expected to continue through 2025, according to Counterpoint Research. The forecast outlines a 3% year-over-year increase in global TWS unit shipments for 2025, signaling a transition from rapid growth to a more mature phase for the category. While Apple is set to remain the leading brand by...
iPhone 17 Pro in Hand Feature Lowgo

iPhone 17 Pro Max Battery Capacity Leaked

Thursday July 3, 2025 5:40 am PDT by
The iPhone 17 Pro Max will feature the biggest ever battery in an iPhone, according to the Weibo leaker known as "Instant Digital." In a new post, the leaker listed the battery capacities of the iPhone 11 Pro Max through to the iPhone 16 Pro Max, and added that the iPhone 17 Pro Max will feature a battery capacity of 5,000mAh: iPhone 11 Pro Max: 3,969mAh iPhone 12 Pro Max: 3,687mAh...
Apple Watch Ultra Night Mode Screen

Apple Watch Ultra 3 Launching Later This Year With Two Key Upgrades

Wednesday July 2, 2025 1:13 pm PDT by
The long wait for an Apple Watch Ultra 3 appears to be nearly over, and it is rumored to feature both satellite connectivity and 5G support. Apple Watch Ultra's existing Night Mode In his latest Power On newsletter, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman said that the Apple Watch Ultra 3 is on track to launch this year with "significant" new features, including satellite connectivity, which would let you...
apple silicon mac lineup 2024 feature purple m5

Apple's Upcoming Macs Listed in New Report

Thursday July 3, 2025 9:09 am PDT by
AppleInsider's Marko Zivkovic today shared a list of alleged identifiers for future Mac models, which should roll out over the next year or so. The report does not reveal anything too surprising, but it does serve as further evidence that Apple is seemingly working on new models of every Mac, including the MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, iMac, Mac mini, Mac Studio, and Mac Pro. Apple is...
Future M5 Chip Devices

M5 Chip Rumored to Debut in These Five Apple Products Later This Year

Friday July 4, 2025 9:14 am PDT by
Apple's next-generation M5 chip is expected to debut in five new products later this year, including the iPad Pro, Vision Pro, MacBook Pro, Mac mini, and iMac. M5 chips will reportedly be manufactured with TSMC's latest third-generation 3nm process, which should result in slight performance and power efficiency improvements over M4 chips fabricated with its second-generation 3nm process. ...

Top Rated Comments

techguy9 Avatar
61 months ago
Apple M1 Macs: Fastest Intel Mac you will ever have.
Score: 85 Votes (Like | Disagree)
omenatarhuri Avatar
61 months ago
Wow, this is a beast.... Real-life benchmarks and reviews will be super exciting to see next week!
Score: 57 Votes (Like | Disagree)
cmaier Avatar
61 months ago

How about the width compared to other silicon (and yes, I’m aware x86 struggles on width due to its instruction set baggage), the massive reorder buffer, the large number of dedicated units for processing or accelerating single tasks in parallel with the cpu, the on die memory? There are other deviations too, but then again you can easily educate yourself on that if you so wish without me spouting off about it. There are large deviations in this chip from the normal train of thought and standard processor design. But feel free to inform me of chips that have this style of architecture if you know of any, I’m happy to see hard facts.
Massive reorder buffer: UltraSparc V had that. I know, because I was the original designer of the reorder unit on that chip.

On die memory: there is no on die memory. It’s in the package, but not on the die. This is easy to see from the actual die photographs that have appeared on Ars (I addressed this claim in another thread and posted the picture). There are a number of LPDDR4X channels with off-chip drivers, so you can even see how the die connects to off-die RAM. Here’s the photo: https://images.anandtech.com/doci/16226/M1.png


”width”: what width are you referring to? There is nothing unusual about the execution width. It’s, in fact, identical to that used in, say Athlon-64 and Opteron. (I know, because I owned the integer execution unit for the first of those designs)

Dedicated units: most chips are now designed as SoC with on-chip encryption units, etc. AMD transitioned to that design methodology with Bulldozer. I know, because I left AMD right around when that started happening.

The CPU portion of the chip is very similar to every other CPU I ever designed. The SoC methodology is now a very common methodology.

What’s different here is competence, not some radical difference between M1 and x86 chips.
Score: 56 Votes (Like | Disagree)
Girder_Shade Avatar
61 months ago
How the heck is Apple so far ahead in performance? It's incredible how much of a lead they have it's like alien technology.
Score: 48 Votes (Like | Disagree)
cmaier Avatar
61 months ago

no honestly the only complaint here is in how closed this system is going to become and for seemingly no good reason.
but M1 looks like a legit beast.
How can you say “for seemingly no good reason?”

It’s got way more performance than any of the competition, and two or three times the battery life.

Aren’t those good reasons?
Score: 46 Votes (Like | Disagree)
cmaier Avatar
61 months ago
But what are all the Apple-haters and Me-doubters going to complain about if that’s the case?

Oh, I know. They’ll fall back to “but it doesn’t virtualize x86.”

Anyway, that’s actually more of a Rosetta-speed hit than I expected, but we’ll see when we get real world data.
Score: 35 Votes (Like | Disagree)