Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

2020 Mac Mini – Putting Apple Silicon M1 To The Test

anandtech.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 767 posts

Re: 2020 Mac Mini – Putting Apple Silicon M1 To The Test

#271

Post by 3JPLW »

fxtentacle wrote: post #39
levesque wrote: post #17

Am I reading this right? Is the new mac mini competing with a Ryzen 5950X? The whole mac mini costs the price of that processor alone. This is insane.

Only in single threaded performance, which nobody actually uses for rendering. In multi-threaded, the Ryzen 5950X is at 28,641 while M1 is at 7,833. So no, the Mac Mini is maxing out at 27% of the Ryzen 5950X if you use it properly. And I was already friendly and used the M1 number for a native port, while in reality you'll likely need Rosetta and take a 33% performance hit.

Yeah, but this is a laptop chip at ~20W. Of course it's not going to compete with a 16-core 120W monster.

Getting 1/4 of the performance with 1/4 of the (high perf) cores and 1/6 of the power is very impressive.

Re: 2020 Mac Mini – Putting Apple Silicon M1 To The Test

#272

Post by Brendinooo »

xuki wrote: post #224
interestica wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These gains are just through improvements in processors. Now, combine that with parallel leaps for battery tech... It's also good that battery tech hasn't jumped too far ahead already - the constraint has helped in the development in these mobile chips. The display panel is still the biggest energy draw on my laptop. There's a lot of chance for improvement there too. A 2 day battery in 5 years isn't that crazy.

Apple is the kind of company that will choose to slim down the laptop instead of making it 2 day battery life.

Do you think that's still true in 2020? Seems like thinness hasn't been a major consideration for a couple of years now.

Re: 2020 Mac Mini – Putting Apple Silicon M1 To The Test

#273

Post by alwillis »

mciancia wrote: post #108
perardi wrote: post #30

That WebKit compile time is impressive. https://techcrunch.com/2020/11/17/yeah-apples-m1-macbook-pro...

Question is whether they were compiling for the same architecture on both x86 and arm.

That's a good question but I don't think it would make a huge difference. Those details should have been included.

Safari is already a universal binary on my Intel Mac running Big Sur; that means WebKit runs natively on Intel and M1 processors.

Re: 2020 Mac Mini – Putting Apple Silicon M1 To The Test

#274

Post by MBCook »

joshstrange wrote: post #239
akritrime wrote: post #2

The last sentence on the first page has a typo, I think. I am guessing it would be `tough competition`, not `though competition`.

I never understand downvotes in this situation. Like are you mad someone is calling out typos? I mean I'm not surprised, I got downvotes for the literally the same thing [0] a few days ago when anandtech published another article full of typos... I like their reporting but the typos and the multi-page nonsense is a huge turnoff. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25052892

I would assume the down votes are because this doesn’t really add to the discussion at all. If you spot typos why not notify the original website instead?

Re: 2020 Mac Mini – Putting Apple Silicon M1 To The Test

#276

Post by tachyonbeam »

qz2 wrote: post #135
tinus_hn wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have already stated they won’t: “We’re not direct booting an alternate operating system,” says Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering. “Purely virtualization is the route. [...]” https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/24/21302213/apple-silicon-ma...

Another item added to the list of why I'm not buying one of these.

I feel kind of grossed out, as a developer (and tinkerer) by how locked down Mac products are. It's not really your computer, you're just renting. Apple has decided that they know what you want and need better than you.

Re: 2020 Mac Mini – Putting Apple Silicon M1 To The Test

#278

Post by eyelidlessness »

fxtentacle wrote: post #54
CapriciousCptl wrote: post #4

From the article's conclusion... "The M1 undisputedly outperforms the core performance of everything Intel has to offer, and battles it with AMD’s new Zen3, winning some, losing some. And in the mobile space in particular, there doesn’t seem to be an equivalent in either ST or MT performance – at least within the same power budgets." This is the first in-depth review validating all the hype. Assuming the user experie…

That conclusion is quite misleading, in my opinion. They write "outperforms the core performance" and the keyword here is "core". What they mean is that if one had a single-core Zen3 and a single-core M1, then the M1 would win some and lose some. But in the real world, most Zen3 CPUs will have 2x or more cores, thus they'll be 2x to 4x faster. So what they mean to say is that they praise Apple for having amazing per-…

Single thread performance still matters a lot for personal computer use. It’s not everything, normal people do benefit from some degree of parallelization, but there’s a reason all of the major PC chip designs continue to push single thread performance even as that becomes more difficult. Most end users see more benefit from those improvements than from more cores.

Re: 2020 Mac Mini – Putting Apple Silicon M1 To The Test

#279

Post by ogre_codes »

Aperocky wrote: post #168
OJFord wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? The hardware's the nice bit.

Yeah this. Imagine if we had the same hardware but designed for linux, I'd pay a premium for that. Although hardware specific software from Apple is probably a big part of that draw too. I don't think we're ever going to see Linux prioritize a certain hardware and put in the effort to make it integrate as well as macs does.

I don't really get this. I switched to MacOS because it's fundamentally BSD with a nice/ well integrated GUI. Almost all of the good OSS I love is supported nearly perfectly.

Perhaps I'm a bit jaded after running into too much bullshit trying to get Linux running well on laptops in the 90s and 00s. Since I made the move I never wax nostalgic for the "Good Ole Days" of fighting for hours to get Wifi working properly.

Even assuming Apple released the specs so you could port Linux to M1, on top of the usual laptop driver issues around the trackpad, wifi drivers, and video drivers, you also have to deal with the Secure Enclave. Without that, you are stuck with either a non-encrypted drive or running drive encryption on the CPU which is likely going to kill many of the performance gains from using the Mac hardware. Likewise, without the Secure Enclave, you lose fingerprint auth.

Not anti-Linux by any means, but dropping Linux on the M1 isn't going to get you the same performance or battery life by any means. You are far better just going with a laptop which was designed to be Linux friendly to start with.

Re: 2020 Mac Mini – Putting Apple Silicon M1 To The Test

#280

Post by postalrat »

foldr wrote: post #175
qz2 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another item added to the list of why I'm not buying one of these.

It doesn't make a huge amount of sense to buy a Mac if you're not going to use Mac OS as your daily driver. A lot of the benefits (e.g. battery life, touchpad quality) are dependent on software as well as hardware, and are greatly diminished on Windows or Linux.

You can speculate but we will never know for certain.
Post reply on HN