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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

#561

Post by ksec »

hyperrail wrote: post #328
alwillis wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In reviews of the new M1 Macs as a whole, I'd like to see a comparison with Qualcomm's best: meaning the fastest current Windows ARM laptops. You may recall that Apple already embarrassed Qualcomm years ago when they shipped 64-bit ARM-based chips at least a year before Qualcomm could do it. When the new iPhone ships, the next fastest phone is the iPhone being replaced by the new flagship phone. The Android phones ba…

From what I've heard myself in the past, I don't think Qualcomm is as far behind as you say, but I would not be surprised if it was. This puts me in mind of one time that I was ranting to a Microsoft colleague over lunch about how MS shouldn't be exclusive with Qualcomm for ARM chips given the very low rewards over the years. They said to me that when Windows Phone 7 first was under development in 2008-2010, choosing…

Qualcomm was never far behind.

And the 64bit ARM Apple chip surprised even ARM themselves. As ARM didn't even have a reference Cortex design out when Apple shipped their first 64 bit SoC. ( Apple was part of early member programme ) And no one thought they will need 64bit so early. ( Which was also true at the time ).

Qualcomm has to optimise for cost, for the same Die Space Qualcomm already includes a Modem, while Apple has Modem as separate pcs of silicon. It isn't Qualcomm is technically subpar, they just have different objective and goals. And vendors are already calling foul for Qualcomm's continue increase in price. ( Which is actually normal due to the complexity of 5G, CPU, GPU and leading edge node development )

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

#562

Post by michaelmrose »

kllrnohj wrote: post #245
314 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is a very misleading statement. They primarily only used the 5950X in single-core tests, and in those tests it doesn't come remotely close to 105W. In fact per Anandtech's own results[1] the 5950X CPU core in a single-core load draws around 20w. It would seem that the switching of AMD chips in the various graphs have caused some confusion. I was referring to the "Geekbench 5 Multi-Thread" graph on page 2. This…

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…

An author who deliberately switches which chip to test in different versions of the same test in order to paint the desired picture isn't much different than one who literally makes up the numbers. The whole article ought to be flagged and deleted.

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

#563

Post by spacenick88 »

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…

As for kernel panics, with iOS likely sharing most if not all of it's kernel code with macOS I'd be surprised if Apple hasn't had an iPhone macOS build since before they released the first iPhone.

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

#564

Post by twhb »

AgloeDreams wrote: post #392
xuki wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'm not sure I or really anyone actually wants a 2 day battery life. Like, we can do that on smartphones right now but users have signaled that the 1 day device is fine for them, notably because of the human gap. You know the gap. If you charge your phone every night it becomes a habit tied to your daily routine. If you were to charge your phone every other night, you might lose track of what day you are on, not char…

Why are you assuming you need to charge a 2-day device every other day? You charge it every night, and in exchange you make it through heavy use days, late nights, and the times you forget to charge it. I had a 2-day phone and downgraded to a 1-day phone and my phone now dies on me much more often, including in each of those scenarios, and looking at the battery level and charging have become a bigger part of my life.

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

#565

Post by mlyle »

marmaduke wrote: post #554
mlyle wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This doesn't align with my experience. Clang is about the same, but GCC often seems much slower emitting cross-ARM code.

  jar% time x86_64-linux-gnu-gcc --std=c99 -O3 -c insgps14state.c -I inc -I ../../shared/api
  x86_64-linux-gnu-gcc --std=c99 -O3 -c insgps14state.c -I inc -I   0.97s user 0.02s system 99% cpu 0.992 total
  jar% time x86_64-linux-gnu-gcc --std=c99 -O3 -c insgps14state.c -I inc -I ../../shared/api
  x86_64-linux-gnu-gcc --std=c99 -O3 -c insgps14state.c -I inc -I   0.93s user 0.03s system 99% cpu 0.965 total
  jar% time x86_64-linux-gnu-gcc --std=c99 -O3 -c insgps14state.c -I inc -I ../../shared/api
  x86_64-linux-gnu-gcc --std=c99 -O3 -c insgps14state.c -I inc -I   0.94s user 0.01s system 99% cpu 0.947 total
  jar% time x86_64-linux-gnu-gcc --std=c99 -O3 -c insgps14state.c -I inc -I ../../shared/api
  x86_64-linux-gnu-gcc --std=c99 -O3 -c insgps14state.c -I inc -I   0.92s user 0.04s system 99% cpu 0.955 total

  jar% time arm-linux-gnueabihf-gcc --std=c99 -O3 -c insgps14state.c -I inc -I ../../shared/api
  arm-linux-gnueabihf-gcc --std=c99 -O3 -c insgps14state.c -I inc -I   1.43s user 0.03s system 99% cpu 1.458 total
  jar% time arm-linux-gnueabihf-gcc --std=c99 -O3 -c insgps14state.c -I inc -I ../../shared/api
  arm-linux-gnueabihf-gcc --std=c99 -O3 -c insgps14state.c -I inc -I   1.46s user 0.03s system 99% cpu 1.486 total
  jar% time arm-linux-gnueabihf-gcc --std=c99 -O3 -c insgps14state.c -I inc -I ../../shared/api
  arm-linux-gnueabihf-gcc --std=c99 -O3 -c insgps14state.c -I inc -I   1.55s user 0.04s system 99% cpu 1.587 total
  jar% time arm-linux-gnueabihf-gcc --std=c99 -O3 -c insgps14state.c -I inc -I ../../shared/api
  arm-linux-gnueabihf-gcc --std=c99 -O3 -c insgps14state.c -I inc -I   1.44s user 0.03s system 99% cpu 1.471 total

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

#566

Post by 93po »

grovellogic wrote: post #316
molszanski wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Best of both of worlds is: - active cooling - lack of a touchbar

I've been wondering if someone could make an active cooling dock for the Mac Book Air. I was even thinking the M1 wattage is low enough that you could have a thermoelectric cooler lowering case temp down to room temp.

I mean if you're desperate to get it to compile in 20 minutes instead of 25 for a particular occasion, you could just grab a bag of peas from the freezer and set the laptop on them.

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

#567

Post by saltminer »

314 wrote: post #109
fxtentacle wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That conclusion is quite misleading, in my opinion. They write "outperforms the core performance" and the keyword here is "core". What they mean is that if one had a single-core Zen3 and a single-core M1, then the M1 would win some and lose some. But in the real world, most Zen3 CPUs will have 2x or more cores, thus they'll be 2x to 4x faster. So what they mean to say is that they praise Apple for having amazing per-…

The Zen3 processor that they are comparing it to is the 5950x - the fastest desktop processor with a TDP of 105W. The entire system power of the M1 mini under load was 28W. What the article is pointing out is that the mobile low-power version of the M1 (as the mini is really just a laptop in a SFF box) is competitive with the top-end Zen3 chip; the benchmark gap is smaller than 2x. We don't know yet how far the M1 sc…

>the fastest desktop processor with a TDP of 105W

TDP is a useless marketing figure. Anand measures the AC power consumption of the Mini, which is a good measure, but that is not comparable against CPU TDP because TDP has a tenuous relation to actual power draw at best [0]. A better comparison would be ARM Mini vs Intel Mini AC power draw, and a similarly spec'd AMD system for good measure. Unfortunately, unless I missed something, the article only measured AC power draw from the ARM Mini.

The M1 is certainly more power efficient than Intel or AMD for the average user, but as far as performance per watt, we cannot make any judgements with the data we have.

[0] https://www.gamersnexus.net/guides/3525-amd-ryzen-tdp-explai...

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

#568

Post by spear »

sudosysgen wrote: post #522
asimpletune wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question. Does the ISA, as a language, really matter? Or is it more a by product of who owns the ISA, eg intel sucks, arm is more liberally licensed. I used to work at intel, and no one I knew there thought ISA mattered at all. That’s just a few people though, so I’m curious if people think there’s something better or worse about the different ISAs as a technology in their own right, or if it’s more about the…

It really doesn't. AMD has essentially the same perf/watt coming in a few months. ISA doesn't change anything nowadays because it all gets decoded into a per-CPU specific actual instruction set anyways.

Exactly right. With today's transistor budgets, the x86 ISA decoder/translator is just noise.

This is not the difference between x86 and ARM -- it's the difference between Intel's team and Apple's (also AMD's). You don't see Qualcomm being competitive even though they also use ARM.

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

#569

Post by Analemma_ »

jakear wrote: post #492
murukesh_s wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would want a 2, 3, even 7 day battery. Why not? I don't want to bother about charging every day. But my worry is that with more and more efficiency in computing and battery tech, if Apple instead decides to reduce the battery capacity? Especially with no competition in sight, or competitors trying to follow Apple, we may end up with smaller batteries instead of more battery life. They seems to be doing that with iP…

External battery for cases when you need it, ultralight for cases when you need it. The ancient carpet the world vs wear slippers debate.

Especially now that thanks to USB-C, it's easier than ever to augment laptop batteries. For $60 you can grab a 100Wh RavPower battery pack that can double the lifespan of a MacBook.

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

#570

Post by SulfurHexaFluri »

oefrha wrote: post #140
314 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Zen3 processor that they are comparing it to is the 5950x - the fastest desktop processor with a TDP of 105W. The entire system power of the M1 mini under load was 28W. What the article is pointing out is that the mobile low-power version of the M1 (as the mini is really just a laptop in a SFF box) is competitive with the top-end Zen3 chip; the benchmark gap is smaller than 2x. We don't know yet how far the M1 sc…

Not to mention 5950X alone without cooling ($799) costs almost as much as an entry level MacBook Air.

Well that CPU has 16 cores / 32 threads while the M1 has 4 high power cores and 4 low power ones.
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