[kllrnohj]

It is comparable at running geekbench 4, yes. And some web benchmarks seem pretty comparable.

But your workload doesn't seem to include those things, so hard to say. Critically A12X is unlikely to have hardware virtualization support, so your use case of VMware would be slow even if it wasn't doing any binary translation.

Also your MBP's fans spin because it's trying to achieve higher sustained performance. Typically mobile devices will just instead thermal throttle hard. Like, lose half their performance hard. How well can the iPad Pro sustain its performance? That's a real big question.

Re AWS racks: No, they can't. A12X in the server world would be a joke. It'd be competing against things like AMD's Rome which is 64 cores / 128 threads with, and this part is critical, up to 4TB of RAM with 128 PCI-E lanes. Even if the A12X could compete on raw CPU throughput it can't compete on I/O, virtualization, etc... The A12X is also going to be pulling a lot more power than you might expect. It's not that much more power efficient.