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2020 Mac Mini – Putting Apple Silicon M1 To The Test

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

#721

Post by saagarjha »

xenadu02 wrote: post #338
breakfastduck wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Going on internet comments they've been marching towards this for years. I've yet to see anything actually happen.

> Going on internet comments So instead of going on evidence and public statements by Apple executives - statements that have repeatedly said the Mac is the Mac - you choose to believe random internet comments? There is a delicate balance between protecting average users who have no clue what is safe software and what isn't vs allowing power users and developers to do what they want. Since the days of ActiveX control…

Why can’t there be a solution between “I accept Apple’s vision for how I can use my device” and “turn all the security off”? Why can’t I run my own trustcache, or tell the OS to trust my developer certificate, or write little specially-entitled commands so I don’t have to turn off GateKeeper and SIP and AMFI. Can you really call a Mac a Mac if to do anything on it you have to completely roll back a decade of protections?

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

#722

Post by saagarjha »

rimliu wrote: post #127
davidhyde wrote: post #102

> "Whilst the software doesn’t offer the best the hardware can offer, with time, as developers migrate their applications to native Apple Silicon support, the ecosystem will flourish." I think that more developers would be excited about migrating their apps to support native apple silicon if Apple wasn't so developer hostile at the moment. I am referring to stuff like Apple's Online Certificate Status Protocol ( http…

You should quit HN for a day or two. The stuff echo-chamber of HN repeats often has very little to do with reality. Apple has many thousands of developers. It is not hostile to them in any way, shape or form. For some reason this cliche is most often repeated by the people who never wrote a single line of code for iOS or MacOS

Hey, I write code for those platforms, I think I have the right to say that Apple can very much be hostile if it wants to be.

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

#723

Post by imtringued »

sudosysgen wrote: post #645
314 wrote: post #611

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Calling me obtuse doesn't add anything of value to the discussion. I was pointing out the multithreaded benchmark in response to the claim that there were none. Read kllrnohj's response that is the sibling to your comment to see how to make a point effectively.

That's not the obtuse part. The obtuse part is ignoring all the other multicore tests in the same uArch and then saying that the 5950X is comparing unfavorably and ignoring the fact that single core perf on Geekbench for the 5950X doesn't scale like any of the other tests and is much lower relatively to the other tests, then taking this one test were a 105W TDP is actually used as significant to all the other compari…

Yeah I think it is incredibly tiring how everyone said "it's both faster and more energy efficient" when the benchmarks have shown something far more obvious and boring. You can make ARM chips that are just as fast as x86 chips and they will end up consuming roughly the same amount of power during heavy calculations but much less in idle. The fact that ARM is king in idle power consumption isn't a surprise. It's ARM's bread and butter.

All the wishful thinking was wrong but that doesn't mean ARM is doing badly.

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

#724

Post by imtringued »

oefrha wrote: post #190
alwillis wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to mention 5950X alone without cooling ($799) costs almost as much as an entry level MacBook Air The M1-based Mac mini starts at $699.

Yeah, forgot about that. Everything else being equal (ostensibly), the M1 Mac Mini is $200 cheaper than the crappy Intel i5 Mac Mini, more if you upgrade the Intel CPU. As an owner of a decked out 2019 Mac Mini, in hindsight I made a shitty purchase decision.

>in hindsight I made a shitty purchase decision.

Yeah you did. Why would you buy something you don't need? It doesn't even matter if the Mac Mini with Apple Silicon existed or if from now on the only computer Apple sold is a Mac Mini.

Okay lets be serious. You bought the x86 Mac Mini because you wanted a x86 Mac Mini, not because you wanted to make perfect purchasing decisions with infinite foresight. A lot of software is broken on the M1 Mac Mini so you made the right decision at that time. It's entirely possible that you would regret buying the M1 Mac Mini.

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

#725

Post by oblio »

thekyle wrote: post #609
oblio wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As much as I dislike them doing it while disregarding other aspects, we need/want slimmer. A notebook PC should be as thin as a real notebook or maybe even less. And it should be sturdy enough, after all, a 5-6 mm plate of metal is quite robust.

Why? I could understand making tablets thinner since they can be used like a paper notebook, but laptops don't work anything like a paper.

Especially with 2 in 1 laptops, the line is very blurry.

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

#726

Post by alwillis »

lhl wrote: post #660
alwillis wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tuxedo Computing and Slimbook both sell Ryzen 4800H computers that will outperform the M1 in heavy multithreaded workloads and come with Linux preinstalled. These laptops aren’t quite as slick as the MBP but weigh in at 1.5kg, have huge 91Wh batteries… 1. You're not going to get 20 hours of battery life. 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…

> 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 app…

The early tests show about 10-12h, which is the same as my (and many other) laptops under regular usage.

Here's an early test that’s quite different from what you described. I’d bet dollars to doughnuts your laptop can't play fullscreen, 4k/60fps video for 20 hours using only the battery:

In fullscreen 4k/60 video playback, the M1 fares even better, clocking an easy 20 hours with fixed 50% brightness. On an earlier test, I left the auto-adjust on and it crossed the 24 hour mark easily. Yeah, a full day. That’s an iOS-like milestone.

Another one: Just 17% of the battery to output an 81GB 8k render.

These are just a couple of highlights from the article "Yeah, Apple’s M1 MacBook Pro is powerful, but it’s the battery life that will blow you away": https://techcrunch.com/2020/11/17/yeah-apples-m1-macbook-pro...

You have to look at the totality of the what's going on.

In short, the M1 Macs are right up there with the fastest machines available at reasonable prices and at a fraction of the power consumption.

The machines set a new level of performance per watt and there's no disputing that. That's pretty good for their first attempt at Apple Silicon Macs.

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

#727

Post by andy_ppp »

xsmasher wrote: post #636
andy_ppp wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they are Apple they are Universal apps I believe?

That's the same question being asked - have they been recompiled as universal apps?

Based on the benchmarks and the fact for Apple it’s only a recompile as they have been planning this I’m guessing yes. But unconfirmed.

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

#728

Post by wishysgb »

BillinghamJ wrote: post #649
taftster wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, I think in the end, this is going to show just how bad monopolies (or near-monopolies) can be for innovation. These are super impressive results, just hoping that the rest of Apple (software, developer relations) can turn away from the draconian future they are currently heading.

There's a fair risk of this turning into new monopolies, but at least it should take a while and hopefully other companies will figure out how to meaningfully compete I guess the fact that Apple will probably never sell this stuff for non-Apple computers will allow AMD to keep competing on the PC side. Clearly when Apple come out with a desktop class chip though, it's going to be hard for anyone else to come close. S…

The technology is mostly done by TSMC and ARM. Apple just modifies the cores and slaps them together.

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

#729

Post by runeks »

kristianp wrote: post #519
runeks wrote: post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the Ryzen 5950X has 16 cores while the M1 has only 4 high performance and 4 low performance cores. So the Ryzen gets 4x multi-core performance with 4x the cores.

I wonder if Apple will bother to produce a CPU with desktop-level TDP. That would really compete with the Ryzens.

I really hope so. And I’d think they’d want something to put in their new iMac, which could be a CPU with 16 M1-cores resulting in a 100 watt TDP.

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

#730

Post by the_lucifer »

whizzter wrote: post #130
patentatt wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not long ago at all, like just a few weeks ago right before zen3 was out in the wild! A double whammy for sure for Intel, tough times ahead indeed. Apologists can hand wave AMD off by citing the huge lead in sales that Intel still enjoys, but that argument falls flat with Apple, a trillion dollar company. Maybe Intel will start to compete on price like AMD used to.

I think they announced a short while back that they're "looking at trying to outsource manufacturing of some high end parts", ie they've known that they were falling behind in too many areas due to their shrinkage problems so they're taking in help from the outside to not become irrelevant. M1 is running on "5nm", looking at specs Intel 10NM is 100Mtr/mm2 vs TSMC's Apple 5nm chips being 173Mtr/mm2 (So even if Intel n…

Yes, even if Intel moves to 7nm, it's at ~202Mtr/mm2. Current TSMC 5nm is between Intel's 10 and 7nm density wise.
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