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2020 Mac Mini – Putting Apple Silicon M1 To The Test

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Re: 2020 Mac Mini – Putting Apple Silicon M1 To The Test

#471

Post by coder543 »

nottorp wrote: post #437
faitswulff wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m still playing nearly decade old games. I just need some thing competitive in decade old gaming so that my wife and I can play together.

Not Apple then. They ditched 32 bit applications and in 2 years they'll ditch 64 bit x86 applications. You want your old games to run forever, you sadly have to do that on x86 Windows (or maybe Linux with more or less of a headache setting them up).

Agree 100%. If you wouldn't buy an iPad to play your games, don't buy a Mac to play those games either. Unless by "games" you literally just mean WoW, which seems to be one of the only major cross platform games that seriously cares about Mac support.

Personally, I would lean towards suggesting the purchase of a console. The new generation has some really nice consoles, and the Nintendo Switch is still really fun in other ways.

Re: 2020 Mac Mini – Putting Apple Silicon M1 To The Test

#472

Post by secabeen »

JAlexoid wrote: post #340
oefrha wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, forgot about that. Everything else being equal (ostensibly), the M1 Mac Mini is $200 cheaper than the crappy Intel i5 Mac Mini, more if you upgrade the Intel CPU. As an owner of a decked out 2019 Mac Mini, in hindsight I made a shitty purchase decision.

Why? Today's purchase of Mac Mini will be a crappy decision in hindsight in about a year... and that is true every year. It would have been a crappy decision - if you got a worse product at the time of purchase. So don't get FOMO.

I actually just bought an Intel Mac Mini to run MacOS VMs with using ESXi. I expect it will be quite a while before stable Mac VM support is available for Apple Silicon Macs.

Re: 2020 Mac Mini – Putting Apple Silicon M1 To The Test

#473

Post by jdeibele »

oefrha wrote: post #190
alwillis wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to mention 5950X alone without cooling ($799) costs almost as much as an entry level MacBook Air The M1-based Mac mini starts at $699.

Yeah, forgot about that. Everything else being equal (ostensibly), the M1 Mac Mini is $200 cheaper than the crappy Intel i5 Mac Mini, more if you upgrade the Intel CPU. As an owner of a decked out 2019 Mac Mini, in hindsight I made a shitty purchase decision.

I bought what I thought was a 2020 Mac Mini in April direct from Apple. The only significant difference on paper was that the base model came with 128GB for the 2018, 256GB for the 2020.

As it turns out, that's true: About This Mac says "Mac mini (2018)" even for the 2020.

I replaced the 8GB base RAM with 32GB of aftermarket and have been thrilled with it. But then I was coming from a 2018 MBP 4-Thunderbolt with only 8GB and the fan noise with it drove me nuts.

I got the i3 because I thought the CPU wasn't the weak point, the RAM was. And so far, for me, that's held up.

Re: 2020 Mac Mini – Putting Apple Silicon M1 To The Test

#474

Post by skavi »

qz2 wrote: post #195
nicoburns wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect the aluminium frame is a key part of the passive thermal cooling. I'd be very surprised if we see a plastic version.

I do miss the plastic ones myself. My sweat dissolves macbooks and they give me a rash.

lol, clean your computer.

Re: 2020 Mac Mini – Putting Apple Silicon M1 To The Test

#475

Post by kllrnohj »

HatchedLake721 wrote: post #106
Deukhoofd wrote: post #37

Interesting that it is not able to outperform the Zen3 CPUs. I had expected it to do somewhat better, especially it being a 5nm processor, and with all the hype around ARM processors. I don't know how well it will hold up to its x86 competitors like this, especially once they launch their 5nm CPUs next year.

Have you seen benchmarks post 1st page? M1 at 7-8W power drain beats or just trails behind a desktop class $799 Ryzen 9 5950x at +49W consumption in single threaded performance. What did you expect?

5950X's CPU cores at 5ghz consume around 20w, not +49W. And it's extremely non-linear power scaling, such that at 4.2ghz it's already down to half the power consumption at 10w/core.

The 5950X's uncore consumes a significant amount of power, but penalizing it for that seems more than a little unreasonable. The M1 is getting power wins from avoiding the need for externalized IO for GPU or DRAM, but those aren't strictly speaking advantages either. I, for one, will gladly pay 20w of power to have expandable RAM & PCI-E slots in a device the size of the Mac Mini much less anything larger. In a laptop of course that doesn't make as much sense, but in a laptop the Ryzen's uncore also isn't 20w (see the also excellent power efficiency of the 4800U and 4900HS)

Re: 2020 Mac Mini – Putting Apple Silicon M1 To The Test

#476

Post by adolph »

oefrha wrote: post #190
alwillis wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to mention 5950X alone without cooling ($799) costs almost as much as an entry level MacBook Air The M1-based Mac mini starts at $699.

Yeah, forgot about that. Everything else being equal (ostensibly), the M1 Mac Mini is $200 cheaper than the crappy Intel i5 Mac Mini, more if you upgrade the Intel CPU. As an owner of a decked out 2019 Mac Mini, in hindsight I made a shitty purchase decision.

The Resulting Fallacy Is Ruining Your Decisions

http://nautil.us/issue/55/trust/the-resulting-fallacy-is-rui...

There’s this word that we use in poker: “resulting.” It’s a really important word. You can think about it as creating too tight a relationship between the quality of the outcome and the quality of the decision. You can’t use outcome quality as a perfect signal of decision quality, not with a small sample size anyway. I mean, certainly, if someone has gotten in 15 car accidents in the last year, I can certainly work backward from the outcome quality to their decision quality. But one accident doesn’t tell me much.

Re: 2020 Mac Mini – Putting Apple Silicon M1 To The Test

#478

Post by Wohlf »

stuff4ben wrote: post #93
mattlondon wrote: post #33

Wow it must suck to be Intel right now. It wasn't so long ago that the trope was while others had better multi-core performance "...Intel still holds the lead for single core performance" Now not only do AMD have a better product, but also Apple now offer equal or better performance than the best that Intel can offer. I wonder what is next for Intel now their £1000+ CPUs are firmly in third place. Looking forward to…

At some point one wonders if Intel will just cede the desktop and enthusiast markets to AMD and/or Apple and just focus on server and high-end computing? As an IBMer this feels familiar for some reason...

Not a chance, the consumer market it massive. Even among PC enthusiasts, AMD is in the minority. It's not even close: https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

I'd sooner expect Intel to start making their own ARM chips to compete with Apple.

Re: 2020 Mac Mini – Putting Apple Silicon M1 To The Test

#479

Post by kllrnohj »

bfgoodrich wrote: post #467
kllrnohj wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The 4800u on 5nm is only going to be marginally better. This is definitely not true. We already know Zen 3 is +20% IPC over Zen 2 on the same process at the same power. So add 20% to the 4800U without changing anything else as a starting point. Then toss in the process improvements from 5nm (which TSMC says is either 15% faster or 30% less power) as well as any further architectural improvements that AMD is doing i…

To be clear, I said that a 4800u @ 5nm (if one could simply scale a design like that) would only be marginally better. That the 5nm boogeyman is more incremental than the big advantage it is held as. You replied that if you take the 4800u, switched it to 5nm, switch it to Zen 3...no actually switch it to to Zen 4 and a completely different chip, it would be lots better so what I said is "definitely not true". I'm not…

A 4800U on 5nm would be 30% more efficient or 15% faster. 5nm was a significant bump.

And that's before considering the density improvement that came along with it (which is also substantial - TSMC's N5 is up to 1.8x the density of N7). Which is why I mentioned Zen 3 & Zen 4, because you don't make the same chip across a shrink. You use the extra budget to do things

Re: 2020 Mac Mini – Putting Apple Silicon M1 To The Test

#480

Post by offtop5 »

bredren wrote: post #412
offtop5 wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any word on if Final Cut and Logic X are recompiled for Arm ?

FCP 10.5 dropped on 11/2: • Improved performance and efficiency on Mac computers with Apple silicon • Accelerated machine learning analysis for Smart Conform using the Apple Neural Engine on Mac computers with Apple silicon Discussion: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/apple-updates-final-cut...

Thanks , my M1 macbook pro gets here tommorow so we'll see what happens
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