There’s a fair bit to unpack here. The Geekbench 5 suite is a slaughter versus
earlier MacBooks and even the mainstream Intel H-series and U-series brigade.
This is a holistic suite that measures a variety of CPU tasks and also involves
elements of machine learning. It registers as a Universal app, so the
optimizations are likely in play here. Alas, we don’t have access to a similar suite
like PCMark that would push the M1s through the emulation layer for
comparison. But this is a bright performance by the M1 Macs.
We tend to take the browser benches a bit less seriously as an overall
performance measure, in that they are measuring limited scenarios of
SURFHVVLQJLQEURZVHURSHUDWLRQVDQGFRGH7KH00DFVWRSSHGWKH¿HOGLQ
two of the three, with the Intel machines reasserting themselves in Basemark
Web, albeit not by much.
Graphics Tests: Last up, graphics tests! This eclectic mix is stocked with a
couple of our benchmark staple AAA games (two of the few we could compare
across Windows 10 and macOS “Big Sur”), as well as GFXBench 5 Metal (more
of a measure of native graphics performance), and the old graphics-test
chestnut Heaven 4.0 from Unigine.
You’ll notice for the two games that we have added a comparison system
dubbed the “Intel Tiger Lake Whitebook,” which represents a best-case scenario
for Intel’s new 11th Generation “Tiger Lake” mobile CPUs and, most relevant
here, its on-chip Iris Xe integrated graphics processor. Iris Xe is Intel’s newly
juiced IGP on its upper versions of its 11th Gen laptop processors.