# The Apple Developer Transition Kit compared against the Surface Pro X in Geekbench

URL: https://technosports.co.in/the-apple-developer-transition-kit-compared-against-the-surface-pro-x-in-geekbench/  
Published: 2020-07-02  
Updated: 2020-07-02  
Author: Raunak Saha

Apple recently announced that it will be shifting from Intel to its in-house silicon basically due to the failure in performance from [Intel’s SkyLake](https://technosports.co.in/2020/06/26/why-apple-ditched-intel-ex-intel-engineer-says-due-to-skylake/)architecture. Apple has made significant progress in its design point-of-view and made its ARM-based SoCs even comparable to the latest Intel ones.

The transition from [Intel to ARM-based chips](https://technosports.co.in/2020/06/23/apple-silicon-for-next-gen-macs-announced-at-wwdc-2020/)will take almost two years and to help developers with this transition, Apple gave away the Developer Transition Kit. This DTK is powered by the octa-core A12Z Bionic chipset seen in the recent iPad Pro which is even more powerful than the Intel Ice Lake-Y CPUs that powers the MacBook Air 2020.

> [https://t.co/60CXgeW2oq](https://t.co/60CXgeW2oq) [https://t.co/P6Xq2vJZ0v](https://t.co/P6Xq2vJZ0v)
>
> — Roland Quandt (@rquandt) [June 30, 2020](https://twitter.com/rquandt/status/1277756742902992901?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw)

The DTK is paired with 16 GB of RAM and a 512 GB storage in a Mac mini enclosure, and recently, devs are benchmarking the new DTK although they aren’t supposed to. Comparing the score with an x86 CPU won’t be a fair battle, so instead, it is compared with another ARM-based [Microsoft’s custom SQ1 chipset](https://technosports.co.in/2020/06/27/microsoft-surface-pro-x-with-7w-surface-sq1-chip-available-in-india-at-%e2%82%b9-96657/) seen in the Surface Pro X.

Like the A12Z Bionic, the SQ1 chipset is also manufactured on a 7 nm process and has 8 ARM Cortex cores. These 8 cores are evenly split across performance and power-saving clusters on both of the chips, but the SQ1 has cores that can reach higher clock speeds because it was made for notebooks.

![The Apple Developer Transition Kit compared against the Surface Pro X in Geekbench](https://i1.wp.com/technosports.co.in/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/surfaceproxvsapplegeekbench.jpg?ssl=1)

![The Apple Developer Transition Kit compared against the Surface Pro X in Geekbench](https://i1.wp.com/technosports.co.in/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/surfaceproxvsgeekbench.jpg?ssl=1)

The SQ1 chipset has lower TDP and fewer GPU compute units than the A12Z Bionic, with higher FP32 floating-point performance. Now, as we see in the benchmarks, the Apple chip has better single-core scores but the SQ1 chipset leads marginally with respect to multi-core performance. This scene is prevalent in both Geekbench 4 and 5 benchmarks.

Not to forget, that the comparision is with the retail unit of Microsoft Surface Pro X against the DTK which features the A12Z Bionic running on the new [macOS 11 Big Sur](https://technosports.co.in/2020/06/23/all-you-have-to-know-about-the-macos-10-16-big-sur/), which is still is in Beta phase and with more optimizations for ARM-based SoCs, performance should improve over the time. Also, a powerful Apple SoC can also be in development that can be used when this transition gets over i.e. finalized or even before that.

Do check out:

https://technosports.co.in/2020/06/30/xiaomi-to-make-custom-smartphone-chips-in-partnership-with-mediatek/

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