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M4 Mac mini's efficiency

jeffgeerling.com

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Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#601

Post by collinmanderson »

jchw wrote: post #74

While it may not be the literal fastest CPU ever, it still seems very, very fast, and the efficiency is pretty compelling. I'm not sure how much of those efficiency gains are a product of the design constraints that Apple is not beholden to (external memory, x86 backwards compatibility, other aspects of the AMD64 architecture, etc.), the slightly better process nodes, or superior design. I'm honestly dying to know, b…

> - I'd love to see better Linux support. (As far as I know, Asahi Linux only covers the M1 and M2 lines, and as amazing of a project as it is, last I looked, it's neither upstreamed nor exactly what one might consider first class. Maybe it's getting there now, though...)

As I understand it M3 is not supported because there's no M3 Mini to run the continuous integration

There is now an M4 Mini, so there might be a chance Asahi Linux will eventually support M4.

https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/112277289414246878

Edit: Turns out the lack of Mini isn't really a huge issue and it's more just that there were significant changes between M2 and M3.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AsahiLinux/comments/1g07jui/mac_min...

Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#602

Post by talldayo »

josephg wrote: post #572
7thpower wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously? What if you want to have a few browser tabs and a spreadsheet open? Or containers? My M1 routinely rests around 22gb of RAM.

How much RAM should a few browser tabs and a spreadsheet use? Spreadsheets and webpages were both invented at a time when computers had orders of magnitude less ram than they do today. And yet, Excel and Netscape navigator still worked fine. It seems to me that bigger computers have caused chrome to use more memory. If 16gb is considered to be a "bare minimum" for RAM, well, how much ram will all those programs use n…

> If 16gb is considered to be a "bare minimum" for RAM, well, how much ram will all those programs use next year? Or in 10 years?

16gb is the figure for the next 10 years. If you see yourself being content with 8gb of memory shared between your CPU and GPU in 2030, you must have a uniquely passive use-case.

I remember when people said 4gb doesn't need to be the minimum for all Macbooks. Eventually MacOS started consuming 4gb of memory with nothing open. Give Apple a few years to be insecure about the whole AI thing and they'll prove to you why they bumped the minimum spec. Trust me.

Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#603

Post by ewzimm »

einr wrote: post #466
ewzimm wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, the 256 uses 2x128 drives while the 512 uses a single drive, so you even get slightly slower storage with the upgrade. The base model is a great deal.

This is true for the Mac Studio but not for the M4 Mac Mini -- they all have a single storage slot and the only difference between the 256 and 512 models is the model of the NAND chips.

You're right thanks. The change was to 2x128 NAND for the 256 drive from the previous generation, not 2xSSD.

Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#604

Post by dangus »

lispm wrote: post #162
dangus wrote: post #53

I see a lot of reviews that say things like this but seem to be written by people who aren't testing against commonly available mini PCs that are built on efficiency architectures. How different is the efficiency of this compared to something like an Intel N100/200/300 or a Ryzen 7 7735HS that you can get in cheap mini PCs from manufacturers like Beelink? I am not doubting that Apple's processors are class-leading bu…

https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/apple-m4-vs-amd-ryzen-...

These auto-generated comparison pages are not useful.

Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#605

Post by rstuart4133 »

rstuart4133 wrote: post #303
dangus wrote: post #53

I see a lot of reviews that say things like this but seem to be written by people who aren't testing against commonly available mini PCs that are built on efficiency architectures. How different is the efficiency of this compared to something like an Intel N100/200/300 or a Ryzen 7 7735HS that you can get in cheap mini PCs from manufacturers like Beelink? I am not doubting that Apple's processors are class-leading bu…

All his tests are published here: https://github.com/geerlingguy/top500-benchmark?tab=readme-o... He does test some N100 machines. TL;DR: The M4 blows everything away, but isn't a general purpose machine. The N100 is slightly better than 50% of the power efficiency of the remainder. It's also slightly faster despite having less cores. Single core speed is looks to be twice the speed of ARM. An N100 box with 16GB of R…

I'm pondering the down votes. My current theory is they are over this:

> The M4 blows everything away, but isn't a general purpose machine.

Perhaps that upset Apple fans.

My definition of "general purpose machine" is one that I can realistically write software for. I written operating systems (with a custom network and GUI stack) in the past. Doing that requires hardware that isn't locked down, and somewhat less obviously is well documented. As in "Intel Architecture Manual" style documented, or failing that at least open source drivers like the Linux i915 driver. Apple doesn't come close to meeting that criteria.

That's a shame, because their consumer hardware is stellar. If it was open, I would chose it over anything else.

Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#606

Post by dangus »

rstuart4133 wrote: post #303
dangus wrote: post #53

I see a lot of reviews that say things like this but seem to be written by people who aren't testing against commonly available mini PCs that are built on efficiency architectures. How different is the efficiency of this compared to something like an Intel N100/200/300 or a Ryzen 7 7735HS that you can get in cheap mini PCs from manufacturers like Beelink? I am not doubting that Apple's processors are class-leading bu…

All his tests are published here: https://github.com/geerlingguy/top500-benchmark?tab=readme-o... He does test some N100 machines. TL;DR: The M4 blows everything away, but isn't a general purpose machine. The N100 is slightly better than 50% of the power efficiency of the remainder. It's also slightly faster despite having less cores. Single core speed is looks to be twice the speed of ARM. An N100 box with 16GB of R…

I do indeed appear to be the idiot who missed the link within the article that had exactly what I was looking for.

Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#607

Post by dcl »

woodson wrote: post #451
dcl wrote: post #368

Is there any benchmarks for these chips doing like regular 'data-sciency' CPU grunt work? Dataframe-wrangling, inverting matrices, doing large matrix, factorisations, fitting decision tree's, etc? I'm very keen on one of these, but I simply have no idea how good they are at my day to day tasks in R or Python.

It depends. If you're using Python with numpy>=2.0.0 (and macOS>=14) then you should benefit greatly from Apple's Accelerate implementation of BLAS/LAPACK routines which are behind most linear algebra operations. I'm not aware of any serious public benchmarks, though.

That sounds pretty promising.

Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#608

Post by nl »

zimpenfish wrote: post #424
nl wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the best answer. The Beelink (and other mini-PC brands) offer comparable performance. The fact they offer lots of different configurations lets you choose your own trade-offs. Assuming you don't have an operating system preference, the base model Mac Mini is tough to beat outright, but as you upgrade it there are other options that get interesting.

> The Beelink (and other mini-PC brands) offer comparable performance. [0] has the new (base!) M4 at 3859 (single) and 14837 (multi) whilst [1] has the Ultra 5 125H 4500 at ~2200 (single) and ~11500 (multi). "comparable" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in your sentence. [0] https://arstechnica.com/apple/2024/11/review-the-fastest-of-... [1] https://browser.geekbench.com/search?q=Ultra+5+125H

> new (base!) M4 at 3859 (single) and 14837 (multi)

I think that's the M4 in the base iMac (8 core), which is different (and less powerful!) than the M4 in the base Mac Mini (10 core).

The Beelink is 32Gb RAM + 1TB storage though.

Like I said: the base Mac Mini is tough to beat!

Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#609

Post by lispm »

dangus wrote: post #604
lispm wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/apple-m4-vs-amd-ryzen-...

These auto-generated comparison pages are not useful.

why not? Having the specs and benchmark results for both CPUs in a table gives a good overview.

What advantage would it bring to manually write such comparison tables?

Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#610

Post by vetinari »

attentive wrote: post #167
vetinari wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So get a stronger one. There will be always something that is better on one or another side. I have 13th gen i7, with 64 GB RAM and 2 TB ssd (and 2.5 GbE). It was 800 EUR + VAT, last year. How much would similar Mac Mini cost? Not a fair comparison either. Edit: 69W for the NUC is not TDP. It is 69W power brick that ships with the machine.

what do you get in https://browserbench.org/Speedometer3.0 ? - m4 mini is 45 it seems.

A few more datapoints, of course completely unscientific, because why not:

                         | Firefox | Chrome | Safari |  Edge
    =====================|=========|========|========|=======
    Intel 1360P (Ubuntu) |  16.6   |  19.8  |  n/a   |  n/a
    Apple M1 (MacOS)     |  24.6.  |  26.3  |  28.5  |  28
    AMD 2920X (Fedora)   |  12.3   |  11.9  |  n/a   |  n/a
    AMD 2920X (Windows)  |  12.2   |  n/a   |  n/a   |  14.9
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