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2020 Mac Mini – Putting Apple Silicon M1 To The Test

anandtech.com

541–550 of 767 posts

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

#541

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…

Why, exactly? As long as Apple keeps their chips to themselves, Intel or AMD will have nothing to worry about.

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

#542
post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is Apple's first non-mobile chip ever. You think this is the best they can do, ever? They have been making mobile ARM chips for quite some time, so it's not like they are inexperienced.

Look at the tread lines. They been able to keep increasing single core performance every year. There is no reason to think that is stopping this year.

They increased IPC only around 5% with A14. The remaining performance increase was from clockspeeds (gained without increasing power due to 5nm).

Short, wide architectures are historically harder to frequency scale (and given how power vs clocks tapers off at the end of that scale, it's not a bad thing IMO).

4nm isn't shipping until 2022 (and isn't a full node). TSMC says that the 5 to 3nm change will be identical to the 7 to 5nm change (+15% performance or -30% power consumption).

Any changes next year will have to come through pure architecture changes or bigger chips. I'm betting on more modest 5-10% improvements on the low-end and larger 10-20% improvements on a larger chip with a bunch of cache tweaks and higher TDP.

Intel 10nm+ "SuperFin" will probably be fixing the major problems, improving performance, and slightly decreasing sizes for a final architecture much closer to TSMC N7.

I'm thinking that AMD ships their mobile chips with N6 instead of N7 for the density and mild power savings (it's supposedly a minor change and the mobile design is a separate chip anyway). Late next year we should be seeing Zen 4 on 5nm. That should be an interesting situation and will help resolve any questions of process vs architecture.

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

#543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I particularly like Chrome profiles. I have a few profiles with their own bookmarks/histories/open tabs/etc. For example, one of my profiles is "Shopping". Another is "Work" and yet another is "Social Media". Context switching profiles at a macro level - as opposed to intermingling work/shopping/social - is beneficial to me. When I switch over to "Shopping", I have my tabs on whatever purchase I'm researching open. I…

Firefox has something like this called containers. The best example is one for facebook, where any call to any facebook servers only works in the facebook container. It has similar setups as well, Work, Home, Commerce, etc.

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

#544
post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been using Safari as my daily driver for some time and it’s quite nice to use. Don’t be afraid to give it another chance.

Does Safari have extensions like Ad Blocker and does it have good developer tools?

1. Yes, it does. I use AdBlock Pro. 2. Yes, it does. I've been using Safari as my primary browser as a Rails developer for at least the past decade and have always found the developer tools at least adequate. I don't use the developer tools on other browsers heavily, so I don't know if I might be missing something.

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

#545

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.

To look at these CPUs a different way, it’s fairly competitive with Ryzen processors that cost $600-700 alone, except that will buy the whole Mac Mini.

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

#546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I particularly like Chrome profiles. I have a few profiles with their own bookmarks/histories/open tabs/etc. For example, one of my profiles is "Shopping". Another is "Work" and yet another is "Social Media". Context switching profiles at a macro level - as opposed to intermingling work/shopping/social - is beneficial to me. When I switch over to "Shopping", I have my tabs on whatever purchase I'm researching open. I…

Firefox also has profiles, though they're not a very prominent feature and are a bit less polished as a result.

    firefox --ProfileManager

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

#547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah this. Imagine if we had the same hardware but designed for linux, I'd pay a premium for that. Although hardware specific software from Apple is probably a big part of that draw too. I don't think we're ever going to see Linux prioritize a certain hardware and put in the effort to make it integrate as well as macs does.

I don't really get this. I switched to MacOS because it's fundamentally BSD with a nice/ well integrated GUI. Almost all of the good OSS I love is supported nearly perfectly. Perhaps I'm a bit jaded after running into too much bullshit trying to get Linux running well on laptops in the 90s and 00s. Since I made the move I never wax nostalgic for the "Good Ole Days" of fighting for hours to get Wifi working properly.…

> I switched to MacOS because it's fundamentally BSD with a nice/ well integrated GUI. Almost all of the good OSS I love is supported nearly perfectly.

This is the reason I initially started using macOS more than a decade ago.

However, I've been told that I'm the wrong kind of user by Apple fans whenever I criticize Apple for transforming macOS from a pretty Unix into a locked-down App Store appliance.

The BSD parts of macOS are getting old and crufty, and are being locked out and overridden by Apple's proprietary and significantly-undocumented layer. For an example of this, check out how networking is done on modern macOS versus how networking is done on a BSD or Linux.

> Perhaps I'm a bit jaded after running into too much bullshit trying to get Linux running well on laptops in the 90s and 00s

Linux has gotten much better, and the problems of the 90s and 00s have vanished for my use case.

These days, at least to me, Linux is the pretty Unix that just works that macOS used to be.

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

#548
post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These gains are just through improvements in processors. Now, combine that with parallel leaps for battery tech... It's also good that battery tech hasn't jumped too far ahead already - the constraint has helped in the development in these mobile chips. The display panel is still the biggest energy draw on my laptop. There's a lot of chance for improvement there too. A 2 day battery in 5 years isn't that crazy.

Apple is the kind of company that will choose to slim down the laptop instead of making it 2 day battery life.

Apple just increased battery life on the MacBook Pro from ~12 hours to 20 hours and kept the form factor the same. Likewise the MacBook Air. Feedback from people using them suggests gains are even bigger for people who use them on battery under load.

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

#549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really get this. I switched to MacOS because it's fundamentally BSD with a nice/ well integrated GUI. Almost all of the good OSS I love is supported nearly perfectly. Perhaps I'm a bit jaded after running into too much bullshit trying to get Linux running well on laptops in the 90s and 00s. Since I made the move I never wax nostalgic for the "Good Ole Days" of fighting for hours to get Wifi working properly.…

Well... That's why I have a ThinkPad, that is certified on Linux. (So your prejudice is dated) I'm literally trying to figure out how to install Python 3.6 alongside 3.9 in MacOSX .... right now, and it's not a one line command. So... No. It has massive issues with developer friendliness. New OSX stalls with bluetooth mice and randomly locks my keyboard(MBP 2020). The only thing I can commend OSX on - battery life on…

pyenv[1] might help you out in this department. It's also cross-platform.

[1] https://github.com/pyenv/pyenv

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

#550
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't find that quote or even the words "undisputedly" or "Zen3" in the article. Was it changed or, if it wasn't, can you give me a pointer, please?

AnandTech split some articles onto multiple pages. The print view gets you the whole article on one page, so I rather prefer it: https://www.anandtech.com/print/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-test...

Wow, I never knew about the print view. It's way more readable, and the lack of comments section makes it quite fast to load despite the very long page.

The tiny drop-down menu in the default view is very hard to discover and quite annoying to click on (many other review sites, like Phoronix, have similar annoying drop-downs).

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