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M4 Mac mini's efficiency

jeffgeerling.com

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Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#301

Post by vunderba »

AcerbicZero wrote: post #51
kranke155 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not a burden. I consider it a typical Tim Cook decision, in that the man led the company that made one of the fastest CPUs in the world, makes it draw as much as a Raspberry Pi. Absolutely crazy feats of engineering, design, manufacturing… and - There is that ONE detail that would’ve made it perfected but it’s botched! I don’t mind it too much, since it’s still 99% close to perfect. But, but…

Hah, Tim Cook decision pretty much sums it up; its the kind of thing that wouldn't have lasted 5 seconds when placed in front of Jobs (although there is a strong chance Jobs would have demanded his own nonsensical addition/subtraction to the design).

Was Jobs in charge when they decide to place the power connector on the bottom of the "magic mouse"? But it's fine because it can fit in a manila envelope.

Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#302

Post by NotYourLawyer »

mp05 wrote: post #76
tredre3 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> With education discount I don't understand why so many people use the discounted price as reference. Surely very few of us on HN are still in college? So let's use the actual price when making comparisons.

> Surely very few of us on HN are still in college? What makes you think that? I'm back in school getting a MEng degree in my 30s.

I mean... surely that's not very common among HNers.

Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#303

Post by rstuart4133 »

dangus wrote: post #53

I see a lot of reviews that say things like this but seem to be written by people who aren't testing against commonly available mini PCs that are built on efficiency architectures. How different is the efficiency of this compared to something like an Intel N100/200/300 or a Ryzen 7 7735HS that you can get in cheap mini PCs from manufacturers like Beelink? I am not doubting that Apple's processors are class-leading bu…

All his tests are published here: https://github.com/geerlingguy/top500-benchmark?tab=readme-o... He does test some N100 machines.

TL;DR: The M4 blows everything away, but isn't a general purpose machine. The N100 is slightly better than 50% of the power efficiency of the remainder. It's also slightly faster despite having less cores. Single core speed is looks to be twice the speed of ARM.

An N100 box with 16GB of RAM and 1TB of NVME is around the USD$200 mark, which is far cheaper than the Mac or Ampere, but in line with the other ARM options. It comes in more form factors with more customisability options than you can poke a pointed stick at.

All in all, it doesn't fair too badly. The low price, fast single core speed, and compatibility with everything makes up for a lot of sins.

Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#304

Post by atonse »

tshaddox wrote: post #192
nicce wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regardless, if people start to abuse this by getting discount while not actually being student or teacher, we can say goodbye to that discount and real students and teachers will suffer from it.

It's not like they're taking a loss from educational purchases. It's just price discrimination. You might as well say "if we all started using newspaper coupons we can say goodbye to those discounts."

But that IS actually true, that if everyone used a coupon, the coupon would eventually go away or become weaker.

The expected percentage of people using a coupon is often part of the calculation (however vague) when deciding the coupon.

Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#305

Post by pier25 »

freehorse wrote: post #295
pier25 wrote: post #128

The M4 Pro is less efficient than the M3 though. https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-M4-Pro-analysis-Extremel...

> The M4 Pro continues to be manufactured using a 3-nm process and on the old M3 Pro (27-28 watts), we measured a lower consumption than on the M2 Pro models (~36 watts), despite its improved performance. In contrast [...] the new M4 Pro can consume up to 46 watts, settling at around 40 watts during the further course—so at its peak, it consumes 60% more. Assuming they refer to the full chips rather than the binned o…

You're only considering the CPU though.

Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#306

Post by cchance »

throawayonthe wrote: post #191
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…

well asahi is going to bring M4 support eventually and there is https://github.com/tpwrules/nixos-apple-silicon also you could just Containerize All The Things on macos idk

Ya like i get the love for linux, but seriously give MacOSX a try for a while, its pretty damn good lol

Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#307

Post by IAmGraydon »

tredre3 wrote: post #44
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…

> With education discount I don't understand why so many people use the discounted price as reference. Surely very few of us on HN are still in college? So let's use the actual price when making comparisons.

They use it because they have an inherent bias and want to put the Mac in a position to compare favorably.

Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#308

Post by cchance »

austinpena wrote: post #2

M4 Mac Mini with 16GB RAM is doing a "good enough" job of editing 6k raw footage in Premiere for my team. I'm surprised to say I'm content with the 16GB of ram so far. Edit: This is in contrast to my M1 Macbook Air with 16GB of ram which would stutter a lot during color grading. So definitely feeling the improvement.

Macbooks Air thermal throttle, thats why the Air with 16gb is an issue and the mini isn't, no fans = throttling at heavy loads, its not a ram issue.

Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#309

Post by cchance »

mamp wrote: post #247
dansky wrote: post #95

The Mac mini M4 performance is around 4-5x in DaVinci Resolve for me - compared to my HP laptop (i5-1135G7). Rendering HDR video was around 12fps there on the i5 - the same project in the Mac mini gets 60fps. The M4 10 core GPU seems on par or better with a mobile RTX3060(65W) for video tests (NR / Deflicker) so I'm also impressed about the M4's efficiency. A lot of power per Watt. It's becoming a dedicated video ren…

When do you turn it off? I have a Mac M1 Studio and I just let it sleep. If things get weird I reboot. I think I recall using the power button about a year ago after returning from vacation after I had shut it down.

Like seriously WTF are people turning it off its 3 watts at idle lol, most power supplies have that much phantom drain lol

Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#310

Post by justinclift »

layoric wrote: post #265
VancouverMan wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Pricewise, things start favoring PCs if you need more RAM, as Mac upgrades are costly. That's the position I'm in, along with some other people I've talked to recently, too. For our situations, the M4 would likely offer more than enough processing power, and the efficiency and physical size are attractive, but a maximum of 32 GB of RAM definitely isn't sufficient. The M4 Pro's 64 GB of RAM is somewhat better, but t…

In same boat, I have the 5950x with 64gb memory running PopOS and there are times I'm hitting swap a lot more than I'd like. 16 or 32gb of memory is just not feasible, and even 2TB of storage would likely cause headaches, I have a 4TB and a 2TB nvme at the moment which will come with me next upgrade. I'm leaning towards an upgrade next year to the 9950x3d if reviews pan out. Sure, it's going to be a bigger machine wi…

Does your existing motherboard allow for more than 64GB ram? The 5950x itself supports up to 128GB: https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/amd/ryzen_9/5950x
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