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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

#551

Post by ksec »

1. This is roughly a 20-25W SoC. Apple could easily scale this to 50W, or a M1"X" with Double of everything, ( likely not with the Neural Processing Unit and the Image Signal Processing ).

2. That would give you double the performance in MultiCore Benchmarks, and Double the Graphics.

3. They will need to double the memory transfer as well, so it will either be a Quad Channel LPDDR4X or may be going with LPDDR5.

4. This hypothetical chip could be coming to MacBook 16" next year.

5. It is the nature of Chip and Devices that we are fundamentally limited by Heat Dissipation. I call this TDP Computing.

6. That is why in many, if not literally every explanation under every graph they will note the TDP difference and you should get the correct perspective or what is being measured.

7. That means you should not expect a 10W / 25W chip to out perform a 32 Core 250W Chip in MultiCore Benchmarks. You are basically comparing Apple to orange. And I dont know why there are many comments in this thread doing it.

8. The M1, and SPEC scores ( no longer are we relying on Geekbench ) are to showcase what Apple is capable of.

Edit: I just deleted a massive Rant specific to HN comments on Hardware.

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

#552

Post by testfoobar »

majormunky wrote: post #543
testfoobar wrote: post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not quite the same. I want to set-up and tear-down entire macro groups of windows and tabs while keeping others active.

Opening my 'Shopping' profile brings up windows and tabs from where I left off. Same with "Social". When I don't want distractions, I just close those profiles. No notifications, no updates, etc. I like the separation.

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

#553

Post by hajile »

anoncow wrote: post #416
AgloeDreams wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AMD has tried a bit, Intel probably won't. You can still get great numbers on desktop x86 with better cores and processes. Zen 4 is perfectly good so far. Apple's M1 already outperforms most desktop CPUs, it goes to reason that a model with more cores and bigger L1 could outperform the whole industry. Surface Go is nowhere close, half as fast in single core, 1/5th as fast in multicore. The 5W TDP is really a generic…

Would the M1 with more cores be able to beat the threadripper at the same wattage? Right now the M1 stands at a score of 8000 Vs Threadripper's 25000. The comparison I am sure is not just about comparing benchmark scores, but is there a prediction possible given that the M1 is at a 24W TDP whereas the threadripper has a 280W TDP (A 3x change in the benchmarks alongside a 10x change in TDP) Does Qualcomm or Samsung ha…

It costs more to move 2 bytes into the CPU than to actually add them. As you go bigger, you spend an increasingly larger amount of time and energy moving data as opposed to actually calculating things.

Anandtech numbers showed 50-89% of total power consumption for the 7601 being used for Infinity Fabric. With 89w remaining spread among 32 cores, that's a mere 2.78w per core or 1.39w per thread at an all-core turbo of 2.7GHz.

Oh, I'd note that the 7601 is a 14nm Zen 1 part.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/13124/the-amd-threadripper-29...!

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

#554

Post by marmaduke »

mlyle wrote: post #393
nwlieb wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this a 1-1 comparison? If the ARM compile is compiling to ARM binaries then there might be less work/optimizations since it is a newer architecture. Seems like a test with two variables that changed. Would be interesting to see them both cross-compile to their respective opposite archs.

Maybe not, but A) it's close-- most of the work of compiling is not microarchitecture-level optimizations or emitting code, and B) if you're a developer, even if some of the advantage is being on an architecture that it's easier to emit code for... that's still a benefit you realize. It's worth noting that cross-compiling is definitely harder in many ways, because you can't always evaluate constant expressions easily…

Hm my experience was that compiling C on arm was always super fast compared to x86, because the latter had much more work to do.

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

#555

Post by kllrnohj »

pwthornton wrote: post #329
kllrnohj wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At this point I'm mostly interested in the Air's performance with its missing fan. I think the clear store here is that the Air will definitely be slower than the rest over time. This isn't a 10W SoC, clearly, so it definitely can't run at its best while being passively cooled. How it behaves when throttled will be interesting for sure though.

It looks like it only begins to throttle after 8.5 minutes of sustained high loads — like exporting 4K video. In a lot of day-to-day work that is much more peaks and valleys, you may never see the throttling.

Seeing reddit reports of gaming throttling more quickly than that, which would make sense since the GPU is going to sit at or near 100% pretty easily with a game and you'll still be seeing a decent CPU load.

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

#556

Post by gnicholas »

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.

I have a 2017 MBP (base, no TB) and found that Chrome made my fan rev like crazy. A friend told me about Brave and I tried it out. Now my fan only kicks on when I'm doing serious work. I know some folks don't like Brave for various reasons, but I love it because my MBP is almost always silent.

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

#557

Post by wildrhythms »

aculver wrote: post #544
sumedh wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[Edit] I'm wrong about this- "Adblock Pro no longer exists for Safari (in the form of an "official" extension)." It still exists, as "AdBlock Pro for Safari" developed by Crypto, Inc. but was not listed on Apple's extension site for some strange reason: https://apps.apple.com/us/story/id1377753262

The listed adblocker is: "AdBlock for Safari" developed by BETAFISH INC, which offers in-app purchases including "Gold Upgrade" which "unlocks" some basic features that gorhill's uBlock Origin already has for every other browser.

https://help.getadblock.com/support/solutions/articles/60002...

Not switching until there are some better options for this.

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

#558

Post by gnicholas »

pwthornton wrote: post #532
testfoobar wrote: post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The reviews I saw said that using Chrome gets good better life, but if you want great battery life you need to use something like Safari. I switched to Safari a few years ago, and I couldn't be happier. Chrome's performance and battery life are atrocious. I only use Chrome when I need something specific from it.

I saw that comment in a couple different places. Presumably Chrome is running through Rosetta 2, whereas Safari is native to the M1. I imagine once Chrome is available natively, performance will be somewhat better, though probably still not as good as Safari.

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

#559

Post by canes123456 »

hajile wrote: post #542
canes123456 wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I agree that most of the gains were due to the node shrink. However, being able to stick to these tick tock gains for the last several years is impressive. They could have hit a wall in architecture and were bailed out by the node shrink but I doubt they would have switch away from Intel if that was the case.

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

#560

Post by gnicholas »

sumedh wrote: post #534
markholmes wrote: post #523

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?

Safari is migrating to a new system of extensions that will make it much easier to port from Chrome. However, I understand it still requires Xcode (which non-Mac folks can't run) and a developer license (which not everyone wants to pay for). I hope to bring my Chrome extension to Safari, but honestly it's not a priority because most people who install extensions are not running Safari (when you consider that most people are not on Mac, and a large chunk of folks on desktop Safari are there because it's the default — and therefore would not likely install extensions).
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