So, Apple finally confirmed that it’s moving to ARM CPUs, something that was predicted for years by analysts. But what does it mean to consumers and professionals? Where does this leave professionals that need to use Windows? Those are some of the questions I’ll try to postulate in this and subsequent posts (Yes! I’ll be more active here!).

Apple’s move to ARM has taken over 10 years of them designing their own A series of ARM chips. Starting with the A4, which was made in conjunction with Samsung, in 2010. And the A6 which included Apple’s fully self designed CPU cores in 2012. They’ve come a long way. But let’s see how they faired in Geekbench 5 scoring (scores available for A7 and later).

Release	A Series CPU	Single Core Performance	Improvement	Multi Core Performance	Improvement
09/2013	A7	278		526
09/2014	A8	357	+28% (A7)	668	+27% (A7)
10/2014	A8X	378	+5% (A8)	1049	+57% (A8)
09/2015	A9	553	+55% (A8)	1026	+53% (A8)
11/2015	A9X	647	+71% (A8X)	1195	+14% (A8X)
09/2016	A10	759	+37% (A9)	1404	+37% (A9)
06/2017	A10X	832	+29% (A9X)	2270	+90% (A9X)
09/2017	A11	923	+22% (A10)	2324	+66% (A10)
09/2018	A12	1112	+20% (A11)	2871	+24% (A11)
10/2018	A12X	1113	+34% (A10X)	4607	+103% (A10X)
03/2020	A12Z	1118	0% (A12X)	4625	0% (A12X)
09/2019	A13	1327	+19% (A12)	3390	+18% (A12)

As you can see, it’s a steady progression regarding single core CPU speeds. From 2013 to today, we’re looking at a five fold speed increase. Multicore performance is a bit different, due to the different configuration of high speed and efficiency ARM cores in each CPU, however performance regularly increased over the years on that front too. The one outlier is the A12Z, but the main difference between it and the A12X is that Apple added/activated an additional GPU core, and didn’t touch the main CPU cores at all, which explains the lack of speed bump. But let’s see how these CPUs compare to their portable Intel counterparts in the top of the line MacBook Pro models that were sold around the same time as the Apple processor release.

CPU	# of Cores	Single Core	Multi Core
A7	2	278	526
Difference	–	-68%	-84%
i7-4960HQ	4 (8)	887	3290

CPU	# of Cores	Single Core	Multi Core
A8	2	357	668
Difference	–	-61%	-79%
i7-4980HQ	4 (8)	919	3262

CPU	# of Cores	Single Core	Multi Core
A9	2	553	1026
Difference	–	-40%	-69%
i7-4980HQ	4 (8)	931	3348

CPU	# of Cores	Single Core	Multi Core
A10	2	759	1404
Difference	–	-10%	-58%
i7-6920HQ	4 (8)	846	3383

CPU	# of Cores	Single Core	Multi Core
A11	6	923	2324
Difference	–	+1%	-33%
i7-7920HQ	4 (8)	918	3483

CPU	# of Cores	Single Core	Multi Core
A12X	8	1113	4607
Difference	–	+6%	-10%
i9-8950HK	6 (12)	1048	5083

CPU	# of Cores	Single Core	Multi Core
A13	6	1327	3390
Difference	–	+19%	-51%
i9-9980HK	8 (16)	1112	6957

If one thing is obvious, is that Apple’s continuous improvements have shown that their CPUs can match Intel’s in performance, at least in single core benchmarks. On MultiCore performance, they’ve gotten very close with the A12X (and A12Z). This is probably the main reasoning behind rumors starting in 2013/2014 of Apple testing ARM based notebooks (which could have actually been iPad Pro prototypes at the time), and picked up speed around 2016.

But the main caveat in this comparison is that these Apple CPUs are used in phones and tablets, and not laptops. Laptops have more active cooling solutions, so the CPUs can run hotter. However, Apple hasn’t released TDP values for their CPUs, but Intel does. We can estimate the latest A series TDP to something along the lines of the CPU in the Samsung S10 and the Microsoft Surface Pro X, which is about between 7 & 9 Watts, so we can round up to 10 Watts for the A12X/Z (just a conservative value, it may be closer to the other CPUs, or lower).

CPU	A12X/Z	i9-8950HK & i9-9980HK
TDP	10W (estimate)	45W

So, Apple has space to grow with its CPU regarding heat and power consumption. We can’t do any specific estimates for future since Apple doesn’t provide TDP for the iPhone CPU version and iPad version. But it seems reasonable that Apple might fork off the A series CPUs into Laptop and Desktop versions due to different TDP requirements for each.

As such, we can reasonably say, that the Mac Mini enclosed “Developer Transition Kit (ARM)” is a bodge, and NOT fully representative of what we’ll probably end up seeing in production models. We’ve already seen this with the “Developer Transition Kit (intel)” in 2005. That was just a basic Pentium IV motherboard that Apple stuffed into a G5 case.

Anyways, I’ll be talking about the new Developer Transition Kit in the next part of this small series of posts.