Earlier quoted context omitted.
I also can feel a speed/sluggishness difference between my M1 Max MacBook Pro and my M4 Pro (14 core).
Honest question: Which one feels faster?
Obviously the M4 Pro feels faster.
New Mac mini, featuring M6 and M5 Pro
241–250 of 349 posts
Re: New Mac mini, featuring M6 and M5 Pro
#242The "4x AI performance" smells suspicious to me, M5 Pro does have slightly higher memory bandwidth than the M4 Pro, but there are also the new Neural Accelerators in the GPU cores, I've always wondered what they actually do, since the SoC has AMX (Apple Matrix Coprocessor) since the original M1 chip era. So is this performance gain probably due to the new Neural Accelerators?
Yes, the "neural accelerators" in the M5 GPU cores really do 4x pre-fill performance over M4. You can find benchmarks online since M5 has been out for months now. I assume the M6 has whatever the next-gen version of those is. These are not the "neural processors" that have been there since M1 (those still exist) but are additionl matrix math accelerators inside the actual GPU cores. Like "tensor cores" on Nvidia GPUs…
Thank you, found some benchmarks and they look really promising. To my understanding those Neural Accelerators are like AMX but for GPUs. With those accelerators the GPU performance on a M5 Max in LLM inferencing would totally be on par with a 5090, that's quite impressive!
Re: New Mac mini, featuring M6 and M5 Pro
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
In fairness, Cyberpunk 2077 is playable through Wine translation on a $400 base model Steam Deck. The game gets a bad rap for the last-gen console performance, but even 2020's iGPUs could handle it: https://youtu.be/oUm5GmJcBPA
The cheapest Steam Deck available now is $789.
You don't need the Deck. The linked video is a random AMD laptop iGPU.
Re: New Mac mini, featuring M6 and M5 Pro
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seems hard to believe, I mean I'm not an AI absolutist but as a programmer it allows me to automate simple things like writing small patches or config changes in a matter of minutes where before I would have invested hours, so hard to believe that it won't at least bump productivity up by 20-60 % overall, it's also tremendously better at finding relevant content and curating it than me so that's another time saver un…
> it allows me to automate simple things like writing small patches or config changes in a matter of minutes where before I would have invested hours One of the problems here is that things like this only count as "increased productivity" in the economic sense if it results in more income at the end of the funnel. Are you actually making more product faster in all your new-found free time? Very few orgs I've worked i…
Yup. And in my experience, AI has made the communication and decision making overhead significantly worse thanks to 100x longer docs, code that noone understands and enormous pressure by executives to magically produce software that just works.
Re: New Mac mini, featuring M6 and M5 Pro
#245Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honest question: Which one feels faster?
Obviously the M4 Pro feels faster.
It’s not obvious to me. It’s somewhat surprising, even, given the specs I just looked up:
M1 Max: 400 GB/s memory bandwidth, ~20.8 FP16 Tflops
M4 Pro: 273 GB/s memory bandwidth ~17.2 FP16 Tflops
Re: New Mac mini, featuring M6 and M5 Pro
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Dedicated graphics cards are faster but not to the point that it matters. It definitely matters, if you're intending to run a Claude Code/OpenCode style agent workflow. Most of those harnesses start with 8-12k token contexts, which is a lot of prefill for a Mac but cheap for a CUDA GPU. The GPGPU compute on the fastest Macs is still trailing behind Nvidia's laptop GPUs; the highest-bandwidth Apple Silicon chip (now…
Is it too much to give the harness a moment to load up the context when starting a new session? Is the brief pause truly a deal breaker?
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Re: New Mac mini, featuring M6 and M5 Pro
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I don't really understand this dooming. no one remembers the last time things got better rather than worse. shitcoin-driven scarcity seamlessly transitioned into COVID-driven scarcity and now into hyperscaler-driven scarcity. the chipmakers' cabal decided to meet increased demand with four digit margins rather than expanding production.
Some of us do. In 2011 Thailand floods that destroyed major HDD manufacturing capacity and drives were really expensive. It's Deja vu for NVMe and SSD drives this time as prices are way up there.
I had to buy a replacement HDD recently. They’re also stupid expensive.
Re: New Mac mini, featuring M6 and M5 Pro
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
Same thing for me! Got it with the education discount when it came out in 2024 and, although I've been pretty disappointed with macOS, it's crazy to see that the price increased by $300 in less than 2 years, with no sign of the price increases slowing down. What will happen once people are priced out of buying computers? I find this worrying.
> What will happen once people are priced out of buying computers? I find this worrying. What happens is that people start buying Chinese mini PCs, some of those even have spyware preinstalled along with another malware that is Windows 11
This is a great route. Just yank or wipe the windows disk, install Linux, and it’s way more secure and performant than any preload windows would be. It probably runs games better too.
Re: New Mac mini, featuring M6 and M5 Pro
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
Obviously the M4 Pro feels faster.
It’s not obvious to me. It’s somewhat surprising, even, given the specs I just looked up: M1 Max: 400 GB/s memory bandwidth, ~20.8 FP16 Tflops M4 Pro: 273 GB/s memory bandwidth ~17.2 FP16 Tflops
True but memory bandwidth is not the entire story. Geekbench (while not a end-all benchmark) shows:
Single-Core Multi-Core
M1 Max, 10-core 2,204 14,004
M4 Pro, 14-core 3,311 24,711
Re: New Mac mini, featuring M6 and M5 Pro
#250Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was not in need of a mac mini then and I’m not in need now, but damn I hope my laptop will last a long time because FML the best price/performance minipc of the last few years got wrecked and the entire market is in shambles
My personal laptop is a 2018 ThinkPad Carbon X1 Gen 6. It's eight years old now. Still running Linux pretty well, but I really need to figure out what to do for a replacement sooner than later...
The Framework laptop looks interesting