Apple’s M1 Mac mini (Running Windows 10) Shockingly Outperforms Microsoft’s Own Surface Pro X

We’ve seen benchmarks confirm the off-the-charts performance of the M1-equipped MacBook Pro and MacBook Air. Now it’s time for the Mac mini to eclipse its competition with an equally impressive performance.

To make these benchmarks even more interesting, the M1 Mac mini ran Windows 10 in a virtual machine.

The benchmarks were conducted by Martin Nobel, with an M1-equipped Mac mini running the ARM version of Windows 10. He used Geekbench 5 for the benchmarking tests and recorded some spectacular results.

Even with Windows running in a virtual machine, the M1 Mac mini scores 1515 in the single-core tests and 4998 in the multi-core tests. According to Nobel, this puts the Mac mini ahead of Microsoft’s own Surface Pro X running Windows 10.

The Surface Pro X is powered by an ARM processor similar to the M1 Mac mini.

Not only did the M1 Mac mini outperform the Microsoft Surface Pro X, but it also did so while running inside a virtual machine. As shown in previous tests, the virtual machine has a significant impact on performance.

The Mac mini scores 1710 on the single-core Geekbench 5 test and 7387 on the multi-core tests when running the benchmarking software natively on macOS.

If the Mac mini easily beats the Surface Pro X in a virtual machine, can you imagine how much it would trounce the Windows machine if it could run Windows natively?