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M4 Mac mini's efficiency

jeffgeerling.com

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Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#521

Post by aryonoco »

naoru wrote: post #250
xeanotods wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it's not performance-comparable but $284 (BF35 coupon discount from $319 list) for Ryzen 5, 16GB RAM and 1TB SSD [ 1 ] in my mind is a good value trade-off versus the Mac Mini. The only thing that gives me pause is the concern expressed by some that Chinese MiniPCs are susceptible to Bios malware. I've looked into Coreboot, Libreboot and System 76 open firmware to mitigate the risk of infected Minisforum firmwa…

That's a valid concern but I personally avoid going into this rabbit hole just for the sake of my (already fragile) sanity. Speaking of issues, the other one with these low cost mini PCs is low-quality SSDs. The one that my UN100D was supplied with was pure garboleum in terms of speed so it had to be replaced.

I've recently bought two minisforum PCs on Amazon. I fully expected the SSD to be garbage and to throw them out. To my surprise, they were decent-ish Kingston TLC PCIE 4.0 SSDs. Definitely not the cheapest SSD on the market.

Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#522

Post by ramassnel1 »

What i am thinking right now is, what we can push the M4 Chip to the Maximum of its power? i've seen a lot of people using it for LLM, making cluster with ExoLab. It's amazing how its perform with such an efficiency.

Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#523

Post by naoru »

jiriro wrote: post #397
xeanotods wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it's not performance-comparable but $284 (BF35 coupon discount from $319 list) for Ryzen 5, 16GB RAM and 1TB SSD [ 1 ] in my mind is a good value trade-off versus the Mac Mini. The only thing that gives me pause is the concern expressed by some that Chinese MiniPCs are susceptible to Bios malware. I've looked into Coreboot, Libreboot and System 76 open firmware to mitigate the risk of infected Minisforum firmwa…

The Minisforum needs an external power brick which probably almosts doubles the size. The Mac Mini does not need any external power adapter which is quite amazing.

Beelink EQR6 has an internal PSU and is also quite small, a bit smaller in footprint actually. It even comes with two full-size m.2 slots and expandable RAM.

Mini is great, exceptionally so, I actually just got a rather souped-up one (that's the reason I'm in this thread) but x86 vendors are catching up and there's a certain possibility that more established brands will pick up.

Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#524

Post by objektif »

spacedcowboy wrote: post #67
LordKeren wrote: post #6

I can’t help but wish that Apple would provide the handful of features needed to make a Mac mini into a competent home server.

I have a Mac mini backed by an Areca 24-bay Thunderbolt disk-array in the rack in the garage. Works like a dream.

Sorry not knowledgeable about this but do you use this as NAS? What software do you use?

Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#525

Post by jcelerier »

ricardobeat wrote: post #403
hollerith wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>apps can share read-only memory for common frameworks How is that different from plain shared libraries?

System design and stability. On MacOS a lot is shared between applications compared to the average Linux app. Dynamic linking has fallen out of favor in Linux recently [1], and the fragmentation in the ecosystem means apps have to deal with different GUI libraries, system lib versions etc, whereas on Mac you can safely target a minimum OS version when using system frameworks. Apps will also rarely use third party rep…

I can run apps with 4 distinct toolkits on Linux and memory usage will barely go past the memory usage of opening one Facebook or Instagram tab in a browser. Compared to compiling a single semi-large source file with -fsanitize=addresses which can cause one single instance of GCC or Clang to easily go past 5G of memory usage no matter the operating system...

Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#526

Post by _kb »

lloeki wrote: post #469
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…

> One can potentially use Nix on a Mac Mini to keep similar development environments to those used in Linux, but AFAIK some packages are not supported on ARM. Any experiences using Nix and nix-darwin as a daily driver? Been using that ever since M1 became a thing; nothing worth mentioning, "not supported" is vanishingly rare in practice.

Seconding this.

Made the switch back to MacOS with the M series after being on x86 and NixOS prior.

The experience was refreshingly tepid.

Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#527

Post by jcelerier »

Rohansi wrote: post #407
kamranjon wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Video Editing. Backend and Frontend development utilizing docker containers. Just browsing the web with tons of tabs. Streaming video while doing other stuff in the background. Honestly most things I'd rather do on my M1.

So probably nothing that actually needs more than 16GB of RAM then. And realistically comparing M1 to an i7 several years older than it. Having more RAM doesn't increase memory bandwidth and having more memory bandwidth doesn't necessarily mean better performance. You aren't even able to make use of all of the bandwidth your M1 is capable of in the real world [1]. Apple Silicon has good perf/watt but the gap probably…

I have a M2 pro with 32G and I hit memory limits just from web browsing.

Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#528

Post by kevincox »

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…

Even if it is rarely used there is no benefit of making it hard to access. There is no harm in having an easy-to-access button that is rarely used.

I guess someone thinks the astetics are worth it, but even if the power button did notably harm astetics (which I doubt) I would take functionality over astetics any day.

If there were two models with different power button placements which one do you think people would buy?

Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#529

Post by lm28469 »

dan-robertson wrote: post #245
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).

You don’t press it very often and this makes it harder to press accidentally (eg putting stuff on top of the computer or a curious cat). I very rarely use the power button on a computer but maybe we behave differently.

That's what I was going to say. Do people still use these ? Given the low power and the general stability (I often have 150-300 days of uptime on my macbook m1) why not just put it to sleep and wake it up with the keyboard/mouse ? I can't even remember the last time I actually rebooted my desktop, maybe last year and I'm not even sure

I'm the first to shit on apple but this sounds like a complete non issue

Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#530

Post by shmel »

AlchemistCamp wrote: post #470
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.

If you continue reading the sentence, it gets even more bizarre: > it's around €650, including VAT. Whatever taxes and discounts apply to the commenter’s own idiosyncratic situation have nothing to do with the price of the product. A couple of years ago, I might have cared what the price of an M2 with Pasadena sales taxes was since I lived there at the time, but I sure wouldn’t have included them when talking about A…

What is the point of not including VAT? You still have to pay it. It is not like you move across the continent just to pay a few percents less.
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