One of the first things you want to know about any new processor or chip with processor cores is its performance. Is it faster than equivalent processors made by Intel or AMD, and is an M1 Pro faster than the original M1? Over the last year, I’ve been looking at different ways of measuring this for Apple’s M1 chips, and this article and its sequels summarises some of the lessons so far.
My starting point is running widely used benchmarks in Geekbench 5 on the 8-Core Intel Xeon W processor in my iMac Pro. Here’s what I see in Activity Monitor’s CPU History window for a typical test run.
In each of these CPU History windows, time passes from left (oldest) to right (newest) for each of the panels, with red representing system load and green the app load. In this case, Geekbench ‘single core’ tests were run for the period starting about a third of the way across each panel, then the ‘multi-core’ tests cut in just after half way, and are reflected on all the cores, until they complete and load drops to almost zero. Being an Intel CPU, the cores on the left with odd numbers are ‘real’, and those with even numbers on the right are virtual cores achieved in Hyper-Threading.
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