2020 Mac Mini – Putting Apple Silicon M1 To The Test

while the M1 is impressive, everybody avoid the Elephant in the room which is: they dropped Windows bootcamp support which make it DOA for me. (and no a VM is not a replacement)

Zero media report it but there is a BIG performance issue with the M1:

Compilers and JIT have had decades of optimization both for ARM and x86. But actually no, code that targeted ARM historically only really was either C, C++, swift, js and Java.

All other mainstream languages such as C#, python, php, ruby, fortran, Perl, R, etc do have (I hope) ARM support but there have been almost zero human resources dedicated to optimizing the ARM codegen, and it will take years for a catch up. Where are such benchmarcks ?? This is a huge fundamental unaddressed topic! I even expect such languages to run faster on Rosetta than on ARM native, ironically!

I wonder if a full DotA match can be played which can last somewhere between 25 - 45 minutes. From Dave2d, M1 Air starts throttling after 8-9 minutes.

I used to run Safari on my mac and it was the best thing in the world:

- It integrated perfectly with the OS

- It saved battery like heeeeell

- It integrated natively with Airpods and media keys

- It clearly had worse performance than Chrome and a couple of incompatibilities, but it was perfectly acceptable

- I could run most of my extensions, namely uBlock Origin, HTTPS Everywhere and Reddit Enhancement Suite

- The native PiP (before it was on any other browser) was AMAZING

I had been a diehard Chrome user since it came out (with the comic book!) on Windows, Linux and macOS. I got fed up with how slow it was becoming and how it was running my fans all the time.

Unfortunately, two things happened that made me quit Safari:

- I found some weird bug wherein whenever I typed an address in the address bar it would always slow down to a crawl

- Apple deprecated and abandoned old extensions. So I lost most of my very valuable extensions, with emphasis on uBlock Origin and Reddit Enhancement Suite. I could live with a different adblocker (I saw adguard at the time), but I could not live without RES. No way.

So I left Safari and have since moved to Firefox. It seems almost as fast as Chrome, has nice integrations and features, but it's no Safari. It still drains my battery and has issues. Firefox has since progressively added PiP (even if it's not native) and support for media keys, which was a godsend, so that's nice.

I'd like to get back to Safari. It would be amazing. Do you know if there is any way for me to get what I used to have back? uBlock Origin (or something with compatible filter lists and custom rules) and Reddit Enhancement Suite?

I meant Zen 2

> 1. You're not going to get 20 hours of battery life.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but you're not going to get 20 hours of battery life in real world usage on the M1 either. The early tests show about 10-12h, which is the same as my (and many other) laptops under regular usage.

> 2. Don't forget it's not just the M1—it's the unified memory, the 8 GPU cores and the 16-core Neural Engine. Most CPU and GPU-intensive apps are going to run faster on the M1 than on your machine. Even x86-64 apps using Rosetta 2 on an M1 Mac may run faster, since those apps are translated to native code on the M1.

Now it feels like you're just regurgitating marketing talking points. Can you tell me what "unified memory" even is exactly? Is it zero-copy support, because AMD has had that on its APUs since... 2013 or thereabouts. Is it LPDDR4 on a pop package, because all that means to me as an end user is I can never upgrade my memory and that I'm limited 16GB of memory (which I regularly go over - I am using 19GB of RAM right now just with browser tabs open). As for performance, we already know from the early testing that the M1 under-performs 8C Zen2 for heavy MT workloads like compiles and renders, so ... what are you saying exactly, somehow running software via emulation/translation will magically make that faster?

> 3. Mac's SSD is probably faster; it's essentially a 256GB cache for the processor.

Again would you simply assume that a Mac's SSD is "probably faster"? It in fact is not. The 256GB SSD on the M1 MBA was tested at 2676MB/s reads, my value NVMe SSD, a $200 2TB ADATA SX8200PNP does 2917 MB/s on my laptop. As for SSD as cache - what are you talking about? L2/L3 latency is typically about 10ns latency. NVMe latency is typically on the order of hundreds of microseconds, roughly 10,000X slower.

> 4. The Mac can run iOS/iPadOS apps too.

Poorly, but I mean, but surely this irrelevant to Linux performance?

> 5. If done right, Linux compiled for the M1 will likely run faster on an M1 Mac than it does on a machine like yours, especially if Apple provides a way to access certain hardware features.

Which hardware features? This is rhetorical. I know this is just hand-waving.

> We’ll have to see what happens but expect these machines to be pretty popular with users, even those who need to run Linux when that the distros are updated.

We'll see what happens. You can track the state of Docker here, for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25119396

> We shouldn't forget that the underpinnings to all of this is Darwin, the BSD-derived Unix layer which is already running natively on M1, including the compiler and the rest of the toolchain.

Darwin/macOS may be POSIX compatible, but it is not production compatible with Linux. Like lots of other devs, I've used Macs in the past (for many years) and you always run into compatibility issues small and not so small until you're either running either a completely parallel devchain via Homebrew or MacPorts, or in a VM. Honestly, WSL these days is a more Linux-friendly dev environment than macOS. But then again, it's even easier/better to run Linux and Docker these days.