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Mac Mini with M4 Pro is the fastest Mac ever benchmarked
41–50 of 56 posts
Re: Mac Mini with M4 Pro is the fastest Mac ever benchmarked
#42So the new Mini is faster than all existing Macs (at least on multicore Geekbench). That revelation sort of throws a monkey wrench into the grand plan of seldom buying a super-duper Mac that will perform competitively for years. Better to buy the cheapest Mac possible (with a Pro CPU) and leave the Studios and Pros to rich fools eager to part with their megabucks.
Nothing about this comment makes sense. The new Mini isn't faster than the new machines with the M4 Max
> Of course, it will soon be surpassed by the M4 Max chip with a 16-core CPU, but no results are available for that chip as of writing.
Also how on earth does a newer machine being fast "throw a wrench" in the performance profile of an existing machine?
This sounds like retroactive rationalization of not being able to get a top of the line machine.
Re: Mac Mini with M4 Pro is the fastest Mac ever benchmarked
#43Not true, obviously: M4 Max in the new Macbook Pros has been benchmarked to be faster [1]. Its not just a little faster than the #2; looking at ~15-20% uplifts in both single and multi compared to the previous kings. The previous production single core #1 was ~3100; Apple skipped over most of the 3000s right into the 4000s. [1] https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/8593555/
The article itself directly acknowledges this saying “of course this will be surpassed once we can benchmark the m4 max” (or something similar). I wonder if their rules are “we only announce benchmarks we’ve done ourselves”? Coupled with “well we need some readers today and our MacBook order hasn’t arrived”
> Of course, it will soon be surpassed by the M4 Max chip with a 16-core CPU, but no results are available for that chip as of writing.
The linked M4 Max benchmark is from after the article was published, so I don’t think this thread demonstrates fair criticism.
Re: Mac Mini with M4 Pro is the fastest Mac ever benchmarked
#44So the new Mini is faster than all existing Macs (at least on multicore Geekbench). That revelation sort of throws a monkey wrench into the grand plan of seldom buying a super-duper Mac that will perform competitively for years. Better to buy the cheapest Mac possible (with a Pro CPU) and leave the Studios and Pros to rich fools eager to part with their megabucks.
I'm still running an Intel-based MacBook Pro from 2019, and it's trucking along just fine. It's not as fast as the M* chips, obviously, but it's still perfectly serviceable for software development. I'm tempted by the new Pro, but I don't consider it a necessity. If I picked up a new Mini or MacBook today, I'm reasonably confident it, too, would last me five years or more.
I switched from the same model three months ago. It’s night and day. I used to have my fan spinning all day; with the new one, I only heard it once since buying it, even in perfect silence. Things that used to slow down, now run in parallel. The battery keeps up with more than a full work day programming, comfortably.
Re: Mac Mini with M4 Pro is the fastest Mac ever benchmarked
#45Seems that if you are into photography you still have to wait until M4 Max based Studio is out and wait out Mac Mini Pro. 2x graphics performance will accelerate many GPU-based tasks in tools like Topaz Photo AI, Lightroom and Photoshop, Luminar, etc.
Re: Mac Mini with M4 Pro is the fastest Mac ever benchmarked
#46So the new Mini is faster than all existing Macs (at least on multicore Geekbench). That revelation sort of throws a monkey wrench into the grand plan of seldom buying a super-duper Mac that will perform competitively for years. Better to buy the cheapest Mac possible (with a Pro CPU) and leave the Studios and Pros to rich fools eager to part with their megabucks.
> Better to buy the cheapest Mac possible (with a Pro CPU) and leave the Studios and Pros to rich fools eager to part with their megabucks.
I'm not sure that quite follows. This benchmark is with the fastest (of 3) CPU options for the Mini. With 64GB of memory and 1 TB storage (to make a fair comparison with the Studio M2 Ultra), you're looking at a $2500 machine. We're not talking about the base $600 config here.
Granted, that's a lot less than the $4000 starting price of an M2 Ultra machine, but it's also 18 months later, and you don't get the GPU performance of an Ultra (see below).
> So the new Mini is faster than all existing Macs (at least on multicore Geekbench)
That's another thing: This only measures CPU performance.
The difference between "Max" chips and "Pro" chips lies in the GPU, not the CPU. The CPU core counts for Pro and Max are the same, but the Max has 2x as many GPU cores. ("Ultra" chips are basically two "Max" dies on one chip)
As you might expect, M2 Max and Pro have near-identical multi-core geekbench scores, but the Geekbench Metal score for the M2 Max is 80% higher than the M2 Pro (and M2 Ultra is about 2.7x the M2 Pro).
A 10-core M4 (w/ 10 GPU cores) scores about 58,000 on Metal (https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/compute/3039631), so the Mac Mini with 14-core M4 Pro (w/ 20 GPU cores) should be expected to score around 116,000 on Metal.
That's almost exactly the same GPU performance as a Studio M2 Max (which would have cost you $2600 last year with 64GB memory and 1TB storage)... If you paid $4000 for the M2 Ultra last year, you would still have comfortably 2x the performance of today's $2500 Mac Mini, and nearly the same multi-core CPU performance.
Re: Mac Mini with M4 Pro is the fastest Mac ever benchmarked
#47Well, it'd be a surprise if the latest chip weren't the fastest. Intel is finding this out the hard way right now.
The surprise is that it’s only the second level chip (Standard, Pro, Max, Ultra) but that the M4 Pro outperforms both the M3 Max (there is no M3 Ultra at this point) and the M2 Ultra (a chip with almost twice as many cores as the M4 Pro).
> it’s only the second level chip
Sure, but (see my other comment in this thread): Max and Pro chips differ in GPU not CPU, and this benchmark says nothing about GPU performance.
Re: Mac Mini with M4 Pro is the fastest Mac ever benchmarked
#48Geekbench multi falls off a cliff after ~16 cores. E.g. the Epyc 9654 with 96 cores benches lower than the Ryzen 7950X with 16 cores of the same generation.
I read this a few times and just wanted to confirm - are you saying the benchmark itself is can’t handle the higher core count?
That's one way to view it. Another is the benchmark doesn't intend to measure the "peak multi-core CPU performance" the article assumes multi-core score is meant to measure. It's really measuring something more like mixed workload performance.
Re: Mac Mini with M4 Pro is the fastest Mac ever benchmarked
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
The article itself directly acknowledges this saying “of course this will be surpassed once we can benchmark the m4 max” (or something similar). I wonder if their rules are “we only announce benchmarks we’ve done ourselves”? Coupled with “well we need some readers today and our MacBook order hasn’t arrived”
> Of course, it will soon be surpassed by the M4 Max chip with a 16-core CPU, but no results are available for that chip as of writing. The linked M4 Max benchmark is from after the article was published, so I don’t think this thread demonstrates fair criticism.
Oh I didn’t look at the linked benchmark because I assumed that the person who posted it would have ensured that the compared “already existing” benchmark was already existing when the article was posted. Derp.
Re: Mac Mini with M4 Pro is the fastest Mac ever benchmarked
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
I read this a few times and just wanted to confirm - are you saying the benchmark itself is can’t handle the higher core count?
That's one way to view it. Another is the benchmark doesn't intend to measure the "peak multi-core CPU performance" the article assumes multi-core score is meant to measure. It's really measuring something more like mixed workload performance.
Oh interesting.
As a performance metric that does seem like it would be more valuable for lots of use cases, so measuring that seems good.
Maybe they need to add an additional “cpu bound multiprocessing perf”, and make it easier for professional tech reporters to understand complex concepts like benchmark numbers :D (in fairness to the reporters it does sound like the benchmark name legitimately implies that it’s a max parallel throughput benchmark, but if this is your job you should really know what your benchmarks are actually measuring).
Honestly a benchmark I would like to - which is more of a software/kernel/os/scheduling one - is “how responsive is this machine under heavy load”.
A non zero part of wanting that as part of a benchmark is that popular benchmarks often seem to be the only way to get companies to fix “uncommon” issues.