They virtualize Windows 11 on the Apple M5 and its single-core power surpasses Intel and AMD

There are revealing experiments, such as the one carried out by a Chinese user. As we read in a Baidu publication, it has put Apple’s latest M5 chip to the test in an unexpected environment. Basically, it is Windows 11 running in virtualized mode. The results in the CPU-Z synthetic benchmark have yielded surprising data in single-core performance.

True to Apple’s strategy of maximizing single-thread performance, the M5 earned a score of 1600.2 points in the CPU-Z test (v1.04.arm64). According to the report, this is the highest score ever recorded in the CPU-Z database for a processor that has not been overclocked.

To put this figure in context, the Intel Core i9-14900KSone of the most powerful processors on the consumer market, scores 952 points in this same test. This places the M5 a 68% above. The difference is even more notable compared to the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3Dwhich with 867 points is 84.5% behind the Apple chip. According to the test, Apple’s core, running at 4.60 GHz, far outperforms its rivals’ Raptor Cove and Zen 5 cores, at least in this specific benchmark.

Multi-core performance tells a different story

When the test measures the performance of all cores, the results are very different. The tested M5, which features 10 cores without simultaneous multithreading (SMT), achieved an overall score of 5976.2 points. This figure, although it surpasses older 8-thread processors, is not competitive against the current high-end from AMD and Intel.

The multi-core result of the M5 is comparable to that of an Intel Core i5-13450HX (5978 points) and is far behind what a Ryzen 9 9950X3D or a Core i7 of recent generations offers. In any case, these results must be taken with caution, since it is a synthetic test executed in a virtualized environment and coming from an unofficial source.

The poor performance in multicore could be due to several factors. Among them, the limited number of cores on the chip, the lack of SMT or, most likely, that the Windows 11 scheduler is not optimized to properly manage the Apple Silicon architecture in a virtualized environment. While it is true that Apple optimizes its operating system very well to work with M chips, after this test it is logical to ask how Windows 11 would work natively on an M5. For now, we will be left wanting to know, because the only way to access the Microsoft system is to virtualize it.