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2020 Mac Mini – Putting Apple Silicon M1 To The Test

anandtech.com

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

#511

Post by bstar77 »

benhurmarcel wrote: post #269
bstar77 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget to add that Apple is now doing this on their version of a "budget" laptop that has no active cooling, that gets 18-20 hours of battery life, that runs emulated x86 code with almost no performance hit and is a 1st gen product. I don't think any of these details can be understated. Even AMD's 1st gen Ryzen kind of sucked and look where that is now.

> "budget" laptop At this price it's more expensive than 80% of best-selling laptops, so not quite budget. If you compare in price to Dell for example, they only compete with their XPS line, which is their high-end one. Apple only does high-end products, which is fine but doesn't make that model cheap.

That why I put the word budget in quotes. It's the cheapest laptop they make even though it isn't all that cheap.

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

#512

Post by amwelles »

read_if_gay_ wrote: post #499
amwelles wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I switched from a MBP to a Mac Mini and iPad Pro last winter for my personal setup. I absolutely love it. I spend roughly equal time on both, but I’m not doing a ton of programming these days outside of work. Taking the iPad traveling is way easier than taking a laptop.

Similar setup (desktop Mac plus iPad Pro with keyboard), and similarly happy with it, but I'm afraid once the COVID situation has been resolved I'll need a MacBook again. The iPad works surprisingly well as a laptop replacement, and I can get things done on it, but it's not an optimal environment for serious work.

I’m curious what you consider serious work? I write a lot on the iPad, can answer emails, get my shopping done, etc. I definitely wouldn’t use it for programming, but I know some people have set it up to do so.

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

#513

Post by sudosysgen »

read_if_gay_ wrote: post #154
fxtentacle wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I looked up multi-core Cinebench R23 and the AMD 2990WX comes in at 33,213 vs. 7,833 was given for the M1 in the article. Apple markets this as a "Pro" device for professional video editing. That's why I believe it is fair to take their word and compare it against my other options for a professional video editing rig. And in that comparison, which Apple has chosen itself, the M1 comes out woefully inadequate at a mer…

> Apple markets this as a "Pro" device for professional video editing. That's why I believe it is fair to take their word and compare it against my other options for a professional video editing rig. That's ridiculous. Threadripper has 8 to 16 times as many cores, runs on hundreds of watts of power and such a CPU alone costs the same as several Mac Minis. Them claiming you can use it for video editing doesn't mean yo…

It is ridiculous, that being said on a per-core basis at a similar wattage Zen 3 is equivalent to the M1 chip, but has an order of magnitude more I/O.

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

#514

Post by bstar77 »

JAlexoid wrote: post #311
bstar77 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that's your choice. I would start looking at AMD's Ryzen offerings because supporting Linux is not going to be high on Apple's list going forward.

has it ever been?

I ran linux for years on my MacBook via Bootcamp. I'd be surprised if Bootcamp ever comes back.

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

#515

Post by megablast »

testfoobar wrote: post #509
CapriciousCptl wrote: post #4

From the article's conclusion... "The M1 undisputedly outperforms the core performance of everything Intel has to offer, and battles it with AMD’s new Zen3, winning some, losing some. And in the mobile space in particular, there doesn’t seem to be an equivalent in either ST or MT performance – at least within the same power budgets." This is the first in-depth review validating all the hype. Assuming the user experie…

Chrome and 20-50 tabs, and my Intel Macbook can be used as a blow dryer. Assuming Chrome's power needs don't change, it seems that the only way to control for overheating an M1 is going to be throttling down - slowing everything down. Curious how M1 machines feel during day to day usage.

Chrome is just awful on a mac. I am not sure why anyone uses it. FF is much nicer to use.

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

#516

Post by heavyset_go »

easton wrote: post #506
tinus_hn wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have already stated they won’t: “We’re not direct booting an alternate operating system,” says Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering. “Purely virtualization is the route. [...]” https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/24/21302213/apple-silicon-ma...

But you can disable Secure Boot and boot whatever OS you want, so unless there's some other hardware gotcha it's not like someone couldn't get Linux running if they wanted to put the time in (which is a big if, considering there's no UEFI-ish helper like on the Windows ARM devices). https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/macos-recovery-a-ma...

There are quite literally millions of ARM devices out there that will never have Linux support, and millions more are being produced each year.

When it comes to ARM SoCs, Linux requires vendor support to get it running. If you want mainline kernel support, that requires even more work that many vendors just aren't providing.

A locked bootloader is just one issue to overcome for Linux support. A lot of the real issues come down to the lack of an enumerable bus on ARM SoCs, along with a lack of drivers.

Without vendor support from Apple to support Linux, these devices will be like the millions of iPhones and iPads that don't run Linux and will never run Linux.

Most ARM SoCs that are sold explicitly as mini Linux computers also have this problem. Many of them are stuck on old kernel forks, because vendors didn't give the proper support their SoCs needed to run a mainline Linux kernel.

tl;dr: For Linux to be a viable option on Apple's SoCs, Apple needs to put in a lot of work to explicitly support Linux. Without that vendor support, you will never be able to download a Linux ISO and install it like you can on an x86 Mac.

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

#517

Post by oflannabhra »

benhurmarcel wrote: post #269
bstar77 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget to add that Apple is now doing this on their version of a "budget" laptop that has no active cooling, that gets 18-20 hours of battery life, that runs emulated x86 code with almost no performance hit and is a 1st gen product. I don't think any of these details can be understated. Even AMD's 1st gen Ryzen kind of sucked and look where that is now.

> "budget" laptop At this price it's more expensive than 80% of best-selling laptops, so not quite budget. If you compare in price to Dell for example, they only compete with their XPS line, which is their high-end one. Apple only does high-end products, which is fine but doesn't make that model cheap.

> Apple only does high-end products

I know this gets repeated often, but this is simply not true. Apple _does_ make high-end products, and they market themselves as a high-end brand, but Apple has always filled as many market segments as they can. There are plenty examples that prove this statement wrong: iPod Shuffle, iPhone SE, the $250 iPad. They never do deep discounts on their products though, so when they age or go stale they are far overpriced; and they do _not_ make value or budget models.

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

#518

Post by bstar77 »

tonyhb wrote: post #262
bstar77 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget to add that Apple is now doing this on their version of a "budget" laptop that has no active cooling, that gets 18-20 hours of battery life, that runs emulated x86 code with almost no performance hit and is a 1st gen product. I don't think any of these details can be understated. Even AMD's 1st gen Ryzen kind of sucked and look where that is now.

This is really the 12th generation of Apple's own chips, though - and the third of this particular design, if I recall correctly.

When I say first gen product, I mean the whole product, not just the chip used. It would be a very different situation if we were talking about an upgraded iPad with a new chip. This is a platform defining moment.

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

#519

Post by kristianp »

runeks wrote: post #504
fxtentacle wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only in single threaded performance, which nobody actually uses for rendering. In multi-threaded, the Ryzen 5950X is at 28,641 while M1 is at 7,833. So no, the Mac Mini is maxing out at 27% of the Ryzen 5950X if you use it properly. And I was already friendly and used the M1 number for a native port, while in reality you'll likely need Rosetta and take a 33% performance hit.

But the Ryzen 5950X has 16 cores while the M1 has only 4 high performance and 4 low performance cores. So the Ryzen gets 4x multi-core performance with 4x the cores.

I wonder if Apple will bother to produce a CPU with desktop-level TDP. That would really compete with the Ryzens.

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

#520

Post by kllrnohj »

314 wrote: post #458
kllrnohj wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're referring to the single time the 5950X's multi-threaded performance was compared then sure, the 105W TDP is fair. But you should also be calling that out, or you're being misleading, as the majority of the 5950X numbers in the article were single-threaded results, and it did not appear in most of the multi-threaded comparisons at all. But in multi-threaded workloads it also absolutely obliterates the M1. Ma…

It's really not clear what you are trying to argue here. The number of single-threaded benchmarks are irrelevant to this point: when the M1 was compared to the 5950X in a multithreaded comparison: * The 5950X was 2x faster * The 5950X was using 4x the power (28W system vs 105W+ for the processor). * The M1 only has 4 performance cores, the 5950X has 16. Even counting the high-efficiency cores as full cores in the com…

The 2x number you're claiming was only for geekbench multithreaded, which was the only multithreaded comparison between those two in the Anandtech article. You're trying to make broad sweeping claims from that one data point. That doesn't work.

Take for example the CineBench R23 numbers. The M1 at 7.8k lost to the 15W 4800U in that test (talk about the dangers of a single datapoint!). The 5950X meanwhile puts up numbers in the 25-30k range. That's a hell of a lot more than 2x faster. Similarly in SPECint2017 the M1 @ 8 cores put up a 28.85, whereas the 5950X scores 82.98. Again, a lot more than 2X.

This is all ignoring that 2x faster for 4x the performance is also actually a pretty good return anyway. Pay attention to the power curves on a modern CPU or what for example TSMC states about a node improvement. For 7nm to 5nm for example it was either 30% more efficient or 15% faster. Getting the M1 to be >2x faster is going to be a lot harder than cutting the 5950X's power consumption in half (a mild underclock will do that easy - which is how AMD crams 64 of these into 200W for the Epyc CPUs, after all). But nobody cares about a 65w highly multithreaded CPU, either, that's not a market. Whatever Apple comes up with for the Mac Pro would be the relevant comparison for a 5950X.

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