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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

#91

Post by kissiel »

fxtentacle wrote: post #72
kissiel wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So a 60W TDP dGPU (gtx 960M) is ~35% faster than this iGPU? I think this is what they called a Rival.

Agree. But don't you think this would come off as a lot less impressive if Anandtech had included all of the old rivals from 1-4 years ago that still rank above the M1? "If you currently own a 2016 15" Acer, buying the new 2020 MacBook will be a downgrade." sounds pretty lame to me. That's why I said they had a very Apple-friendly comparison set.

I don't think people are considering replacing a gaming 2kg+ laptop with a fanless macbook. Authors included two popular Turing dGPUs for comparison.

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

#92

Post by xuki »

Performance per watt of this thing is INSANE, take a look at the battery left after compiling WebKit, compared to older Mac:

https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/WebKit-Com...

https://techcrunch.com/2020/11/17/yeah-apples-m1-macbook-pro...

IMO the all day battery will be THE killer feature of the new laptops.

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

#93

Post by stuff4ben »

mattlondon wrote: post #33

Wow it must suck to be Intel right now. It wasn't so long ago that the trope was while others had better multi-core performance "...Intel still holds the lead for single core performance" Now not only do AMD have a better product, but also Apple now offer equal or better performance than the best that Intel can offer. I wonder what is next for Intel now their £1000+ CPUs are firmly in third place. Looking forward to…

At some point one wonders if Intel will just cede the desktop and enthusiast markets to AMD and/or Apple and just focus on server and high-end computing? As an IBMer this feels familiar for some reason...

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

#94

Post by mrweasel »

danaris wrote: post #48
Deukhoofd wrote: post #37

Interesting that it is not able to outperform the Zen3 CPUs. I had expected it to do somewhat better, especially it being a 5nm processor, and with all the hype around ARM processors. I don't know how well it will hold up to its x86 competitors like this, especially once they launch their 5nm CPUs next year.

Interesting that your takeaway from all this is "oh, it can't beat some of the top x86 chips in existence—it can only meet them on even footing. Guess it'll be falling behind next year." This is Apple's first non-mobile chip ever. You think this is the best they can do, ever?

I’d argue that the M1 is a mobile chip and it’s the low end model. You’re still right, the M1 is no where near the best Apple is able to deliver.

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

#95

Post by fxtentacle »

d3nj4l wrote: post #67
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-…

I feel like most people here haven't seen the SPEC benchmarks AnandTech performed (and they're partly to blame for that; their UX is awful). But the M1 is toe-to-toe with desktop Ryzen: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste... E: And multi-core SPEC: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste... , where they're on par with mobile Ryzen.

I looked up multi-core Cinebench R23 and the AMD 2990WX comes in at 33,213 vs. 7,833 was given for the M1 in the article.

Apple markets this as a "Pro" device for professional video editing. That's why I believe it is fair to take their word and compare it against my other options for a professional video editing rig. And in that comparison, which Apple has chosen itself, the M1 comes out woefully inadequate at a mere 24% of the performance.

Of course, for a notebook, the M1 is amazing. But I feel irked that Apple and Anandtech pretend that it's competitive with desktop workstations by having such a misleading conclusion about it being on par with Zen3 - which it clearly isn't.

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

#96

Post by kissiel »

bluedino wrote: post #87
fxtentacle wrote: post #21

I'm a bit surprised by their tagline "Integrated King, Discrete Rival". I'm using an Acer Aspire V15 Nitro Black 15" from 2016. On Aztec Ruins Normal Offscreen, I get 270fps. So my 4 year old $800 laptop is still faster than the brand new M1. It seems Anandtech chose a very Apple-friendly set of laptops to compare to.

That would have you scoring higher than the Acer Nitro 5 (2020) with a 1650, so I doubt you're running the same benchmark. This might be more accurate, 88fps: https://gfxbench.com/device.jsp?benchmark=gfx50&os=Windows&a...

Lol. So that would be a +100% upgrade for fxtentacle.

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

#97

Post by HatchedLake721 »

TwoNineA wrote: post #61
HatchedLake721 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are only Cinebench benchmarks. Have a look at SPEC2006 and 2017 benchmarks, M1 beating desktop class Ryzen 9 5950x, or just trailing behind (edit: in single threaded performance), keeping in mind cost of each and that: > While AMD’s Zen3 still holds the leads in several workloads, we need to remind ourselves that this comes at a great cost in power consumption in the +49W range while the Apple M1 here is using…

> the Apple M1 here is using 7-8W total device active power. Anandtech showed almost 27W power draw under full load for the M1 Mini.

That's Anandtech's quote. M1 beats or trails behind Ryzen 9 5950x in single threaded performance, hence they mention 7-8W.

The 27W power draw comes from multi threaded performance. Ryzen's multi threaded power drain is at ~130W (as far as I know).

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

#98

Post by bonestamp2 »

piyh wrote: post #66
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-…

It bodes really well for future chips with higher power budgets. The Pro seems a bit underwhelming for what it could be though.

On performance, ya I agree. Although, they basically doubled the battery life over the previous generation so that alone might be worthwhile for some users.

I think we'll see an additional higher end Macbook Pro 13" when they start to release Apple Silicon models with discrete GPUs.

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

#99

Post by akritrime »

MBCook wrote: post #88
akritrime wrote: post #51

I am confused about one thing, in multithreaded scenarios, can an application use 8 threads or 4? Also how does the scheduling work, can I pin a task that I know will be demanding on the firestorm cores?

Applications can use all 8 cores. There is one benchmark in the article where they somehow turn off the efficiency cores to figure out they add about 30% to the total CPU power in multi-core.

Oh I see it. I missed their SPEC2017 page.
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