A first benchmark result for the new MacBook Air has emerged, providing a closer look at the performance of the M2 chip in the brand new notebook.
In a Geekbench 5 result posted by “Mr. Macintosh” on Twitter discovered , the MacBook Air with the M2 chip and 16GB of RAM achieved a single-core score of 1,899 and a multi-core score of 8,965. These values are roughly equivalent to those of the 13-inch MacBook Pro with the M2 chip and confirm that the notebooks perform almost identically in synthetic tests, as was the case with the M1 models. While the M2 chip in the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro performs equally well in the Geekbench tests, the MacBook Pro could perform better in real-world use with sustained, demanding workloads because it has a fan, unlike the MacBook Air.
MacBook Air with M2 chip shows what Apple Silicon can do
The result also confirms that the M2 MacBook Air outperforms the base model Mac Pro with an 8-core Intel Xeon W processor, despite costing nearly $5,000 less. While this is not a direct comparison, it is a testament to the impressive performance of Apple Silicon processors in cheaper Macs. It remains to be seen whether the base model M2 MacBook Air with a 256GB SSD is equipped with only a single NAND memory chip. Last month, it was revealed that the base model M2 MacBook Pro has significantly slower SSD speeds than the equivalent M1 model because it is equipped with a single 256GB memory chip instead of two 128GB chips. Due to virtual memory swapping, the slower SSD speed can sometimes impact overall system performance. (Image: Apple)
