Going beyond standard emulation, Rosetta 2 does some of the work in advance. That’s part of the reason why Apple can claim that some Intel apps that require heavy use of graphics processing actually perform better under Rosetta 2 on the M1 than they did on an Intel Mac. This means most user input, graphics operations, file access, and other macOS standard features are handled by native code. Depending on how the app is coded, the emulator may continue on to the next instruction or wait for a response from the OS. In cases where a common operating system (OS) is used on both the physical hardware and the virtual system being emulated, such as with older and newer Mac computers, any calls to the operating system can execute at full speed, without the emulator being involved. The most basic type of emulation is to load apps designed for other computer systems or games into memory and interpret each instruction in a way that makes sense to the processor in use. Rosetta 2 is the name of Apple’s emulator/translator software. Related: M1 MacBook Air Benchmarks Suggest Apple Mac Silicon Is The Chip To Beat Some had concerns about whether the new chip would work with existing apps and how much performance would suffer if Intel apps were running through an emulator. At the same time, efficiency has increased to offer up to 20 hours of battery life. The newest 13-inch MacBook Pro, for example, beats the 1.7GHz quad-core Intel Core i7 version that came out a few months earlier, boasting nearly three times the CPU speed and up to five times the graphics performance. The M1 chip is still making headlines for offering blazing speed while sipping power gently.

Emulators typically slow down performance significantly, but something about Apple’s hardware and software seems to make the impact negligible. When Apple announced that its newest 13-inch MacBook Air, MacBook Pro and Mac mini would be powered by its M1 chip, it told existing Mac owners that the Intel apps would still run just fine and in some cases even faster.

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