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M4 Mac mini's efficiency

jeffgeerling.com

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Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#281

Post by metta2uall »

7thpower wrote: post #208
josephg wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I don’t know why 8gb base models get so much hate online. 8gb is 64 billion bits of memory. If you’re writing everyday software and you need more memory than that, you’re almost certainly doing something wrong.

Seriously? What if you want to have a few browser tabs and a spreadsheet open? Or containers? My M1 routinely rests around 22gb of RAM.

I also use an 8GB M1. It has firefox with many tabs & windows open in OSX and also a Linux VM in UTM which is running VSCode, vite, and another firefox with lots of tabs. It's performing well! (although swap is currently at 2.3GB, and there's a further 3.5GB of compressed data in RAM)

Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#282

Post by Retric »

nicce wrote: post #278
derefr wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty sure people already are abusing it. I think this is a lot like the situation with oldschool Photoshop: for a long time, people pirated Photoshop, and Adobe really didn't care — didn't bother to do anything to make piracy the least bit challenging. This was seemingly because they considered the amount of money they could make off of sales to individuals , to be relatively trivial next to the amount of money the…

> Apple likely thinks the same way about this education discount: all their material income comes from volume purchases or alternate distribution channels (e.g. cellular carriers for phones), or in-store sales; with online retail sales being a relatively-trivial fraction. So it doesn't really matter if they're "losing" part of their margin on these online retail sales. Exactly. At that point when the amount of abuser…

> So, the more people talk

It’s been decades at this point, I suspect we’re at an equilibrium by now.

Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#283

Post by freehorse »

The m4 has 6 efficiency cores and 4 performance cores. This is 2 efficiency cores more than the previous generations, and the same number of p-cores, thus higher e to p core ratio, which can explain a large part of the increase in power efficiency. Not to say that otherwise there is nothing remarkable here, of course there is, but if the author found a 30% increase in efficiency compared to m2 while they claim they expected 4-10% after 2 generations of chips, it could be because of that.

The m4 pro has 4 e-cores and 6-8 p-cores, hence I would not expect similar increase.

Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#284

Post by goosedragons »

GeekyBear wrote: post #219
AshamedCaptain wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We've already seen videos from the usual suspects showing that people who are sufficiently skilled with a soldering iron can replace the flash chips Sure, but I don't think soldering skills is exactly what I'd have in mind when I think "upgradeable".

As noted above, you can simply replace that module with a higher capacity module with just a screwdriver, as iFixIt did. However, there is a real opportunity for those who do have soldering skills to make a quick buck here. You could pretty easily buy the cheap base model M4 and resell it as a custom upgrade build, as long as you were clear that the SSD was no longer stock.

The problem is getting the module...

It's not an easy solder job and they are picky about what NANDs they work with and how they're configured. It's better than soldered to the board but not by much.

Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#285

Post by OJFord »

giobox wrote: post #105
mcv wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does that mean the discount is only for Americans? I don't see anything about it on the Dutch version of the Apple site. Still looks pretty affordable. Until you look at the upgrades. € 230,00 for +8 MB RAM?! There are places you can get that for a tenth of that price. I suppose doing your own upgrades isn't an option anymore? (My last Mac was a 2011 unibody.)

They have variations of the program in some European countries. It's been a long time for me, but in the UK they used to just whitelist university domains (we didn't use .edu TLDs either).

We use .ac.uk though (and much of the non-USA world uses .ac.ccTLD similarly) so no need to whitelist individual university domains. I don't know about Apple, but that's a common approach. (And does irritate some where they don't use either and get missed, Canada for example.)

Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#286

Post by johndoe0815 »

nextos wrote: post #9

I use Linux, but I think the cheapest M4 Mini offers an incredible value and efficiency per €. With education discount, it's around €650, including VAT. It's pretty hard to find such a silent and powerful machine for that little. Any comparable options? A good fanless build with a i3-14100T is more expensive and 40-50% slower on Geekbench. An i5 is a bit closer. Some 2024 Ryzen CPUs can match or exceed its multicore…

In Germany you can get the cheapest (base version, 16GB RAM/256GB SSD) M4 Mini for 579€ via Unidays edu discount (also including VAT).

I picked mine up from the post office yesterday, it's 50% faster in Geekbench single/multi-core CPU benchmarks than my M1 Pro Macbook Pro and about as fast in GPU performance. Impressive.

Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#287

Post by Rohansi »

matthew-wegner wrote: post #272
leptons wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The Mac mini M4 performance is around 4-5x in DaVinci Resolve for me - compared to my HP laptop (i5-1135G7). You could pick a variety of non Apple CPUs that easily deliver 4-5x the performance of an 11th gen i5. Maybe don't be disingenous and compare the M4 to a more recent CPU like i5-14600K, which is also 4x the performance. I'm not comparing on power efficiency, since that was not mentioned at all as part of your…

Is it 4x the performance? Passmark shows 38,951 / 4,282 versus 24,724 / 4,555: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i5-14600... https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Apple+M4+10+Core&id... So i5-14600K is 1.57x on multi-core, slightly worse on single-core. $235 for the CPU versus $599 for a whole system. Could maybe match the total price, but Intel won't be able to come anywhere close on the power e…

4x vs. the old i5, not the M4. They are trying to say that comparing to a CPU released four years ago is pointless because the newer CPU is obviously much better.

Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#288

Post by madeofpalk »

freehorse wrote: post #283

The m4 has 6 efficiency cores and 4 performance cores. This is 2 efficiency cores more than the previous generations, and the same number of p-cores, thus higher e to p core ratio, which can explain a large part of the increase in power efficiency. Not to say that otherwise there is nothing remarkable here, of course there is, but if the author found a 30% increase in efficiency compared to m2 while they claim they e…

IIRC as well, the M3 chips had an odd efficient to performance core ratio that’s not present in the M4, which is slightly interesting

Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#289

Post by JohnTHaller »

smm11 wrote: post #117

I just sold an M1 Mini and grabbed a Beelink. It's wonderful being able to run whatever OS/distro I want on the Beelink, and it's plenty strong enough for whatever. I love this adoration for Apple, primarily for my investment accounts, but in a cloud world I have no idea why there's such a demand for the M4.

Beelink's $299 base model of their compact desktops is enough for most regular home users. Not as powerful as the Mac Mini M4 but half the price and double the storage. Plus you can upgrade your own storage to 2TB for about $100 and it'll be faster than the Mac Mini's.

Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#290

Post by ghshephard »

freehorse wrote: post #283

The m4 has 6 efficiency cores and 4 performance cores. This is 2 efficiency cores more than the previous generations, and the same number of p-cores, thus higher e to p core ratio, which can explain a large part of the increase in power efficiency. Not to say that otherwise there is nothing remarkable here, of course there is, but if the author found a 30% increase in efficiency compared to m2 while they claim they e…

That would explain improving performance, but I don't actually understand how that would improve efficiency. Particularly at the high end where they quote 6.74 Gflops/W .
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