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M4 Mac mini's efficiency

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Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#361

Post by tylerflick »

ideashower wrote: post #349
prewett wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe they already have, depending on what you need. Settings >> General >> Sharing provides lots of options. "Remote Login" is SSH and SFTP, and last time I used it, "File Sharing" was SMB. "Screen Sharing" and "Remote Management" seem useful, too. I assume that "Media Sharing" is supposed to allow iTunes on your network to see media files, although I've never used it and the information on the dialog is limited.

Can you run it headless? Like, if I have it power on after a reboot, is it possible to log in remotely?

Yes it supports remote admin via terminal or virtual desktop. I currently use mine like this for transcoding while freeing up my macbook.

Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#362

Post by [deleted] »

Arcuru wrote: post #218
mrtksn wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would that be?

Companies tend to focus on the overall % profit margin for a product. If a higher percentage of sales are for a discounted (edu) SKU with lower margins, they will tend to raise the price of the product to hit their desired profit margin. e.g. If a company was selling a product at $1000, and wanted to offer a 20% discount for EDU that would be bought by 50% of the market, they would need to raise the price by about 10…

[deleted]

Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#363

Post by msgilligan »

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…

I've been using Nix on macOS for almost a year. The good (and bad) thing about Nix is that it supports many different use cases, so you have to spend some time understanding the options before you can even figure out which flavor to install.

A good way to get started is to start using Nix to replace/supplement Homebrew. You can install Nix in addition to Homebrew and have some packages installed by one and some by the other. You can uninstall a Homebrew package and then reinstall it with Nix. You can even remove it with Nix and go back to Homebrew if you like.

I would generally recommend the following:

1. Use the Determinate Systems Nix installer, see https://zero-to-nix.com/start/install

2. Use "Flakes" (unfortunately the core documentation isn't updated for flakes)

3. Use "Home Manger" -- I would recommend the Flakes-based "Standalone setup": https://nix-community.github.io/home-manager/index.xhtml#sec...

I would wait on nix-darwin until you are sure you need/want it. (I have recently started using it for its support of the `linux-builder` feature, but not everyone needs that.)

As a software developer who uses macOS to develop for Linux, it is a great tool and I cautiously recommend it to those who are willing to deal with some learning curve and frustration.

I haven't yet used nix-darwin enough to make a recommendation one way or another. (But the `linux-builder` feature is compelling if you need it: https://nixcademy.com/posts/macos-linux-builder/)

Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#364

Post by ciupicri »

dansky wrote: post #296
matthew-wegner wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The 120GB/s memory bandwidth of the unified memory helps especially with video, I guess. The M4 CPU isn't really stressed out most of the time. Only multicam and HLG conversations it maxes out. Once I patched my old Dell T1650 BIOS for ReBAR support yet the iGPU of the i5 1135-g7 had similar GPU performance for video as the Intel Arc A380 in the desktop PC. The old PCIe3 speed limited its performance. I heard others…

How did you patch the Dell T1650 BIOS for ReBAR support?

Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#365

Post by wtallis »

layoric wrote: post #269
kamranjon wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what it's worth, the apple silicon machines are much more efficient on RAM than most - a 16gb m1 absolutely mops the floor with the 32gb of ram I have in my thinkpad with an i7. It's not really even close.

Not sure what you mean by 'efficient', they are faster for sure (amazing memory bandwidth thanks to on chip memory), but to my knowledge they would be the same for amount of data stored. So that same think pad will likely be faster at tasks that need 24GB for example, highly depend on the use case as always.

Memory requirements for general-purpose desktop usage usually don't come down to a single task with a large working set that needs to fit in RAM in its entirety. It's more often a matter of the aggregate memory usage of many tasks, which means that in practice there's a wide gray area where the OS can make a difference, depending on the effectiveness of its memory compression, swap, signalling memory pressure to applications, suspending background tasks or simply having fewer of them in the first place.

Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#367

Post by H1Supreme »

henryfjordan wrote: post #141
1-6 wrote: post #45

“If only they didn't put the power button on the bottom.” While I think Apple was off the rocker on this particular decision, I do respect their org structure that allows this type of decision to occur. Believe me, there are companies where a dozen people or more would weigh in and prevent an unpopular choice. Consensus sometimes hinders a desired result (both good and bad).

It's a way of signaling how the product should be used. Plug it in, hit the power button, put it down, and never turn it off again. For many users that's probably the only time they will ever interact with that button (or want to). I actually think it's a really good choice and shows Apple really understands design. And with the relatively low power consumption it makes sense. It's not like it's drawing a ton of powe…

> I actually think it's a really good choice and shows Apple really understands design. And with the relatively low power consumption it makes sense. It's not like it's drawing a ton of power on idle

I use a Mac Mini (older model) in my music studio. It shares a surge protector with approx. $12k worth of audio gear (some of it nearly impossible to replace). I have all the gear + the surge protector switched off anytime I'm not using it. Which is most of the time.

While the weight and form factor would make powering the M4 Mini on a little more than a nuisance, I have a hard time lumping this into one of Apple's great design features.

Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#368

Post by dcl »

Is there any benchmarks for these chips doing like regular 'data-sciency' CPU grunt work? Dataframe-wrangling, inverting matrices, doing large matrix, factorisations, fitting decision tree's, etc?

I'm very keen on one of these, but I simply have no idea how good they are at my day to day tasks in R or Python.

Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#369

Post by [deleted] »

GeekyBear wrote: post #23

Also interesting, the M4 Mini has the flash storage on a replaceable module, instead of being soldered to the motherboard, although the NVMe controller is still integrated into the SoC. iFixIt and others have already posted videos showing that the flash storage is now upgradable. > M4 Mac mini Teardown - UPGRADABLE SSD, Powerful, and TINY https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rtdGxBeSkz8

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