MacBook Air finishes last against Galaxy Book S, Surface Pro X in app benchmark

[Sanjiv Sathiah]

I would also add, that in the testing of the Air I did in its native macOS with Geekbench 5, the Snapdragon 8cx powering the Galaxy Book S was significantly faster than the MacBook Air, posting a multicore score of 2745 versus just 1544. What you actually get here is a gain in the MacBook's performance comparatively. Why? Because it is still running Windows 10 natively as well as the apps tested. Even though Office has been optimized to run on the Galaxy Book S, it is a hybridized version that is still running 32-bit emulation. Overall, however, it still finished last in this test.

[Doug]

But why include a browser that has 0.001% of the market? Without that this falls the other way.
But on the other hand we have seen that the iPad and it's arm a series processor is competitive with intel chips. This is why things like photoshop are being ported over. So this is just more evidence that intel is having issues keeping up.

[_MT_]

Have you tried other battery tests for comparison? The problem with video playback is that it's a highly specific workload that enjoys hardware acceleration. It's interesting to many people for sure, but it doesn't necessarily test the CPU, how efficient it is at generic processing.

I imagine the win in GeekBench has something to do with core count. :-) If you run applications that can utilize multiple cores well, great. But that's often not the case as some workloads don't parallelize well and PCs were limited to a single core for a long, long time. There is also the advantage of having specialized low power cores. It's like having two processors in your PC, one more powerful and one more frugal. That's just not how PC CPUs are designed. Maybe they should, at least mobile chips, but it's not magic. And the situation around integrated Intel GPUs is laughable. The 620 and co. should be dead. Certainly not mainstream. I think even more ridiculous example in Apple's stable is the Mac Mini. Even the MacBook Pro 13 has a better GPU. And that's a laptop. Against a desktop.

You shouldn't have chosen Apple. I know the Air is iconic. And Apple is popular in the US. But, if you want to run Windows, you should choose something that sells with Windows and regular users actually run Windows on it. And why not look into Chromebooks? I know cross platform benchmarking sucks, but benchmarks have to reflect what people are actually doing.

[_MT_]

Just a small correction. When I was criticizing Intel's iGPUs, I was talking about systems without a dGPU where it's all you've got. If you have a dGPU, iGPU should be all about efficiency in mundane tasks. In my eyes, two very different scenarios.

BTW, you seem to have a bug. One of my earlier comments had two quotes. It displays fine in the forum, but under the article, only the second part (starting with the second quote) is visible.