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M4 Mac mini's efficiency

jeffgeerling.com

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Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#381

Post by dansky »

nl wrote: post #317
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…

It's not disingenuous to do a real-world comparison to a system you already own when stating the specs. It's actually much more useful to hear these real world anecdotes than to look at geekbench numbers.

Thank you!

I expected a fast M4 package but still was mind blown to see the video editing performance. After all these video renders run for many hours.

My 2 year old i5 laptop - even with 64GB RAM and 2x2TB SSDs upgrades - was around the same price like the base M4 Mac mini / uses similar Power. The PC surely is way more versatile with these specs and expandability.

Staying mostly in X86-land due to affordable RAM & storage, nothing I currently have comes close to the M4 performance per Watt - and now even performance per $/€ - in my video-editing use case.

Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#382

Post by Izikiel43 »

josephg wrote: post #156
IshKebab wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it is soldered to the storage module. You have to desolder the flash chips from that module and replace them. You can't just order a bigger storage module from Apple (or anyone else) and plug it in.

I don’t think anything is stopping you buying a second hand / 3rd party module online. It just needs to be physically compatible with your particular generation of hardware.

Well, someone has to build the 3rd party module

Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#383

Post by layoric »

wtallis wrote: post #365
layoric wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 appl…

Good points well made, macOS likely is more 'memory efficient' in that regards.

Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#384

Post by linhns »

nicce wrote: post #86
no_wizard wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

all you need is a .edu address If I recall correctly. you can buy them on alumni addresses. That said, a far chunk of HNs never completed college, like myself and lost access to any email accounts of this sort, which only further supports your argument directly, as the EDU discount isn't universally attainable

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.

Tbh, it's not that much compared to Apple sales.

Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#385

Post by wodenokoto »

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.

Educational discount is a pinky swear that you are a student or buying it for a student.

So it is in practice available to everyone if you want to ruin nice things for students.

Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#386

Post by ricardobeat »

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…

Memory usage is not comparable across Linux and Mac. MacOS is much better at avoiding swap, uses memory compression, shared frameworks etc. At the same time it tries to use all the memory available which makes direct system-wide comparisons not accurate. A good rule of thumb is that 8GB on Mac == 16GB on Windows/Linux.

Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#387

Post by solardev »

wodenokoto wrote: post #385
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.

Educational discount is a pinky swear that you are a student or buying it for a student. So it is in practice available to everyone if you want to ruin nice things for students.

Don't you usually need to verify somehow, like an .edu address?

Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#388

Post by zamadatix »

H1Supreme wrote: post #367
henryfjordan wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 anyti…

M1 and newer Mac Minis automatically power on when plugged in/given power. If you're using an external power switch then that basically becomes the power button.

I'd still like the button to have been on the side or something over looks but it does seem like a pretty reasonable choice overall.

Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#389

Post by staticfish »

josephg wrote: post #156
IshKebab wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it is soldered to the storage module. You have to desolder the flash chips from that module and replace them. You can't just order a bigger storage module from Apple (or anyone else) and plug it in.

I don’t think anything is stopping you buying a second hand / 3rd party module online. It just needs to be physically compatible with your particular generation of hardware.

I don't think this is true. If you watch the videos, dosdude1 specifically says he had to order blank NANDs for this process. Then you DFU restore the system from another mac. I have no proof, but I assume part of this DFU restore process is the new NAND chips being hardware paired in some way.

Again I have no proof, but there must be reasons he claims they have to be blank NANDs

Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#390

Post by kamranjon »

goosedragons wrote: post #270
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.

I just struggle to believe this. What OS is the Thinkpad running and did you put everything there (i.e., no corporate crud?).

I run Ubuntu on my Thinkpad - I generally notice the biggest difference with video editing, but really multitasking anything is night and day because of the memory bandwidth. I use the same software on both machines for video editing, Davinci Resolve.
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