Of Flight Simulator add-ons, including Airliners, Scenery, AI Traffic, Military Aircraft and more. Not bad for an entry-level machine!). (However, I will add that I did make a video of my MacBook Pro—with its 16GB of RAM— opening 75 apps in just over a minute. Between unboxing videos, extensive benchmark suites, and multi-thousand-word reviews, there is no lack of coverage of these machines. By now, you've probably read a slew of stuff about both the MacBook Pro and its slightly-lighter MacBook Air cousin.
![]() X Plane Review Free To DoI ran a slew of benchmark results, and they all—well, almost all * See openssl benchmarks—showed what you've read on other sites: These new entry-level M1 Macs may be the fastest single-core processors in existence, and they hold up well in multi-core tests as well.I'm not going to bother reproducing every test I ran here it's just a whole slew of numbers, and you can find similar on many other sites. At that amount, it's a no-brainer to get the MacBook Pro.I think the Air will be more than sufficient for almost anyone, but me being me, even if I were free to do so, I'd find it hard to buy a machine that was lacking a GPU core, regardless of what marginal performance difference it might make.When I got my machine, I still had my 16" MacBook Pro, along with my 2018 MacBook Air, and of course, my desktop iMac. And if you don't care about storage and are fine with a 256GB SSD in the MacBook Pro, then the price delta for an 8-core GPU machine is only $50.The GPU kept pace with the discrete Radeon on the 16" MBP, and absolutely destroyed the integrated GPUs in the Air and MBP. Impressive stuff.In my disk tests, the SSD in the M1 MBP was much faster than the one in my Air and my iMac, and slightly faster than the one in the 16" MBP. It also nearly matched my 8-core/16-thread iMac, which score 7661. The results were the same in multi-core, where the 8-core M1 MBP (7524) expectedly crushed the dual-core Air (1603), but also the six-core (12-thread) MBP (5522). Using Geekbench 5's single core test, my M1 MBP scored 1731, which absolutely crushed the 2018 Air (790), 2019 MBP (1029), and even the 3.6GHz Core i9 in my 2019 iMac (1177). Instead, I'd like to focus on some of the more interesting results.There is no doubt the M1 is a fast CPU. Eventually you'll get a summary showing the rate at which openssl can sign and verify keys using various cryptographic algorithms.I've long used this test in my benchmarking, as it's stable over time and gives a good sense of progress in CPU speeds. Just type openssl speed in Terminal, press Return, and then wait. With one apparent exception that may not even matter much…There's a simple CPU benchmark built into the openssl tool in macOS (which is really LibreSSL, not OpenSSL, but that's another story). From my prior article, here's how AES-NI works:The new AES-NI instruction set is comprised of six new instructions that perform several compute intensive parts of the AES algorithm. At that time, my theory was that Apple had enabled AES-NI in macOS 10.14.5.And I think it's this same set of instructions—or more accurately, the lack of such instructions—that accounts for the M1 CPU's poor performance here relative to the Intel chips. I dug into this about a year ago, as I was looking to explain a huge increase in openssl benchmark scores on some of my existing Macs. Why is that? My theory is that it's due to a set of instructions specific to Intel's chips, the Intel® Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) New Instructions, or AES-NI for short. Here's a look at a few of the results from my testing:As you can see, the M1 MBP is nowhere near the Intel chips' performance on these openssl benchmarks. But does it matter?Despite the poor results, I'm not sure they matter at all to the vast majority of macOS users. In the multi-core tests, it's also quite slow, though its eight cores are enough to defeat the MacBook Air. In the single-core tests, my M1 MBP is running at about half the rate as that of my iMac, and it's even slower than the MacBook Air. Is iso for mac and pcIn my role with Many Tricks, Rosetta makes a huge difference for us: While we've already updated some of our apps to run natively on the M1 chip, we don't have to rush to get them all done, as Rosetta handles the hard work for us—the user simply sees an app that works as it did on Intel-powered Macs. Unless you do that, though, I don't think you'll notice these speed differences in day-to-day use—it's not like it takes longer to connect to an encrypted web site.A hidden star in the Intel-to-Apple silicon transition is Apple's Rosetta technology, which allows you to run Intel-native code on the M1 chip. It appears to me that openssl doesn't leverage the Secure Enclave (honestly, I don't even know if Apple allows such use), so there's no hardware acceleration for the encryption and decryption calculations in the openssl tests.If you use openssl to, for example, encrypt huge archives, you'd be affected by this issue. The company says it has built new security protections "deep into the code execution architecture of M1."The Secure Enclave has AES encryption hardware, so I would expect it's very fast. No surprise that Apple's browsers fair best, with the Safari Tech Preview scoring best in each test (except for JetStream 2, where it's only a couple of percentage points behind regular Safari. BrowserHigher scores are better, and the best are highlighted in green. So I wouldn't call my results robust, but they do clearly show the impact of browsing using a Rosetta-translated browser. (Chrome also has an Intel-specific build available they don't distribute a universal binary.) I thought it'd be interesting to see how all of these browsers handle some web benchmarks, so I put them through their paces using four different tests.Update: Firefox 84 Beta supports Apple silicon, so I re-ran my benchmark tests using that version as well—I've added its results to the table.My benchmarking was pretty simple: I made each browser window the same size, insured no other apps were running, and ran each benchmark exactly once in each browser.
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