2020 Mac Mini – Putting Apple Silicon M1 To The Test

It seemed somewhat reasonable that an article that would be passed around the department or on to your boss would require a fee.

I can't find any mention of it on their website, though. Am I getting my websites confused or did they drop it altogether?

The tiny drop-down menu in the default view is very hard to discover and quite annoying to click on (many other review sites, like Phoronix, have similar annoying drop-downs).

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

I would expect that, when Apple brings out their next iteration of chips, they would target the higher end of the Pro line with more cores and ports along with higher RAM capacities.

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.

If you throw in "everyday work" - then we have passed the need for new chips altogether.

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.

Take the M1's 28W under a multi-threaded load, that's going to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 4-5w/core for the big cores probably (single-core was ~10w total, ~6w "active" - figure clocks drop a bit on the multi loads, and then the little cores are almost certainly much less power draw particularly since they are also much, much slower). In multithreaded loads the per-core power draw on a 5950x is around 6w. That's a _much_ closer delta than the "105W TDP vs. ~28W!" would suggest.

M1's definitely got the efficiency lead, but it's also a bit slower and power scales non-linearly. It's an interesting head-to-head, but that 105W TDP number of the 5950X is fairly irrelevant in these tests. That's not really playing a role. Just like it's about as irrelevant as you can get that the 5950X is 4x the big CPU cores, since it was again primarily used in the single-threaded comparisons. Slap 16 of those firestorm cores into a Mac Pro and bam you're at 60w. Let it run at 3.2ghz all-core instead of the 3ghz it appears to now since you've got a big tower cooler and that's 100w (6w/core @ 3.2ghz per the anandtech estimates * 16). That'd be the actual multi-threaded comparison vs. the 5950X if you want to talk about 105W TDP numbers.

Critically though the M1 is definitely not a 10W chip as many people were claiming just a few days ago. You're definitely going to see differences between the Air & 13" MBP as a result.

1: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16214/amd-zen-3-ryzen-deep-di...

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...

Context switching profiles at a macro level - as opposed to intermingling work/shopping/social - is beneficial to me.

When I switch over to "Shopping", I have my tabs on whatever purchase I'm researching open. I can drop the whole project for a few weeks and resume it later right where I left off. None of it can bleed over into my "Work" profile. I like the separation. Helps keep my head clear.

Also they started rolling out the first M1 optimized version of Chrome (but has been pulled since due to stability issues): https://9to5google.com/2020/11/17/chrome-mac-apple-silicon/

A bit offtopic but I've always found it amusing that a form of lithography, of all things, is fundamentally powering our tech revolution for decades. Especially after a girl I knew learned lithography in an art class, watching her do it in a primitive form, which inspired me to read about it's history in art and professional uses (signage, etc).

That combined with vacuum tubes (which also rank high up there in the revolution thing) are the two things I one day wish to learn how they really work. Not just surface level nodding along.

[1] https://www.eetimes.com/euv-tool-costs-hit-120-million/

They say “decades in the making” - when did it first become viable, and then how long to master the process and become confident enough to mass produce consumer goods from it? I’d love to see a timeline w milestones.

I need to recharge my own wetware at least once a day. So there is a nearly guaranteed several hour idle period where I'm not using any technology and where laptops and phones can be recharging too.

I don't see much end user value in not taking advantage of that.

It's like if you parked your car literally at a gas station every night anyway. Would you really care about a fuel tank that could let you drive for more than 24 hours?

Hopefully the Era of Ive is over. There are promising signs around, but I'm not ready to believe it yet.

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 charge it and then the perceived battery life experience is worse. This is why smart watches with 3-4 days of battery have not prevailed over those with one heavy day of battery. They are annoying to know what day you are on so you might just charge it every night and if you do, the platform is trading off so much power that the experience is worse.

Plus, then you have to carry 2 days worth of battery or have half the power envelope as a laptop with one day. the concept all sounds great but the reality of people using things really has honed in on the fact that these things need to fit into habit and use cases that make sense.

The Air form factor is already pushing the limit of what you can do with aluminium and still have high confidence it won't warp when you shove it into your bag, or have it fall over when you open the screen past vertical.

I could see them slimming down the battery to get more components in, maybe, rather than two day battery life.

Which would probably be the right call. There just aren't enough circumstances where not plugging in your laptop while sleeping is necessary to justify it.

Personally I'd like them to make a model with a cellular modem, with all-day battery life even reasonably far from a tower. That would be fun.

Like they just fucking did with the M1 MacBooks.

That's kind of weird.

But I'd take a closer look at those numbers: in 5 months intel has lost 2.5 points that AMD has gained. Doing some stupid, atrocious math of just taking the average point gain over those 5 months (and not accounting for the fact that my pc enthusiast friends are stating that their next machine will be AMD), that puts November of 2023 that they are 50% market share. That gives Intel very little time to pivot.

If so... then Intel's latest chip generations should be traced back to 8088 in 1979.

I know this gets repeated often, but this is simply not true. Apple _does_ make high-end products, and they market themselves as a high-end brand, but Apple has always filled as many market segments as they can. There are plenty examples that prove this statement wrong: iPod Shuffle, iPhone SE, the $250 iPad. They never do deep discounts on their products though, so when they age or go stale they are far overpriced; and they do _not_ make value or budget models.

Should that be a serious goal for Apple though? Is there that much more money for them if they jump into the race-to-the-bottom budget market, where I assume much of the remaining share is? It seems there is some added value in being a luxury product.

Based on the data I've seen so far, I'm not sure why they even did a with fan Pro variant. Even if the market for an 11-12" model is smaller I'm not sure why they didn't do that instead. I was sure that was going to be the reason they didn't refresh their 12" Intel system.

But like you said, likely would eat into the iPad market - on the other side, as long as they don't make it a 2-in-1, the iPad should still have more than enough reason to exist.

This model of Air is obviously a transition product with new guts in an old shell. I suspect that as Apple introduce fully redesigned, second generation Apple Silicon products, you might see something that is closer to the 12” MacBook.

However the interesting part would be what are they gonna do with their iPad Pro line at this point I don't see a reason for it not to run Big Sur or the Bigger Sur they'll release next year and compete directly with the surface.

What I see Apple doing is the following:

iPhone/iPad non-pro continuing to use A series SoCs and run iOS

iPad Pro migrate to M series SoCs and become what is essentially Apple's Surface Pro

Macbook Air 13" and 11" (possibly drop to a single 12" model) with M series SoCs this essentially will be the Surface Laptop/Book competitor

Macbook Pro's will continue as they are 13" and 16" models, if Apple goes for 11" and 13" MBAs they might move the MBP to 14" and 16".

Without discrete GPUs and essentially no way to "upgrade" the CPU to a higher model I don't really see the MBP 13" being viable in the long term tbh, I think they'll need a model that will differentiate it much more from the MBA and unless Apple starts binning their future M series SoCs much more in line with Intel and AMD I don't see them having too much of a range here for upgrades.

So alternatively I also see them dropping the 13" MBP altogether and having only a 15" or 16" on whilst the Air will occupy the smaller form factors.

I had the 12” MacBook for a couple years and the form factor was amazing. I backpacked around the world with it. But it was so underpowered, it was barely useful. I found myself using my phone more and more because it was less frustrating. I would love to see what an M1-powered 12” MacBook could be like!

- active cooling

- lack of a touchbar

But 8-9 minutes of full 100% CPU is a relatively rare occurrence for the vast majority of users. Developers might occasionally do that, but it will be very language and project dependent.

But I would also be a little wary, because ARM systems are way more locked down than x86 systems today.

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 business interests behind them that matters.

It's worth noting that cross-compiling is definitely harder in many ways, because you can't always evaluate constant expressions easily at compile-time in the same way your runtime code will, etc, too, and have to jump through hoops.

Instead of making your cpu able to execute more instructions per cycle, why don't you make each instruction do more work. SSE packs four floats/ints or two doubles/longs into a single 128bit register and then you can do the same ALU operation to each lane.

It works great on certain workloads.

With AVX, Intel increased the size of these registers to 256bit (eight floats) in 2011 and are currently pushing AVX512 doubles the width again (16 floats).

Apple, and ARM in general are limited to 128bit vector registers (though they are plans to increase that in the future)

Cinebench is well known as a benchmark which takes advantage of the 256bit AVX registers, and some people have speculated that Apple's M1 might be at a significant disadvantage because of this, with just half the ALU thoughput.

But these numbers show that while cinebench gets a notable boost from AVX, it's not as large as you might think (at least on this workload), allowing the M1's IPC advantage to shine though.

Intel is so large that it is using up too much of production capacity for anyone to enter the market. Intel crumbling = more resources for new players to get lower cost manufacturing capacities.

HDMI doesn't have power and typically no peripherals like keyboard and mouse. To get that to work as I would want it would need multiple cables plugged into it.

I just want to stick my computer into a hub like a flash stick and have it boot up.

You replied that if you take the 4800u, switched it to 5nm, switch it to Zen 3...no actually switch it to to Zen 4 and a completely different chip, it would be lots better so what I said is "definitely not true".

I'm not sure this logic follows.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste...

Looking through the benchmarks, the zen 2 parts generally seem to have lower performance than the M1. The cinebench multithreaded benchmark is one exception. It's not that surprising because the 4800U has more cores than the M1 has high performance cores. The M1 wins the single threaded cinebench benchmark.

Nvidia has been making ARM SoCs since 2008. They have been used in cars, tablets, phones, and entertainment systems.

What do you think powers the Nintendo Switch?

> Although it's extremely difficult to get accurate Apples-to-non-Apples benchmarks on this new architecture, I feel confident in saying that this truly is a world-leading design—you can get faster raw CPU performance, but only on power-is-no-object desktop or server CPUs. Similarly, you can beat the M1's GPU with high-end Nvidia or Radeon desktop cards—but only at a massive disparity in power, physical size, and heat.

...So, given that, and assuming that Apple will attempt to compete with them, I think it likely that they will, at the very least, be able to match them on even footing, when freed from the constraints of size, heat, and power that are relevant to notebook chips.

[0] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/11/hands-on-with-the-ap...

This was my conclusion too. Does this mean, there is not much possibility of desktop pcs moving to ARM anytime soon? Perhaps, laptops might move to ARM processors, but even that seems iffy, if AMD can come up with more efficient processors (and Intel too with its Lakefield hybrid cpu)

It’s hard to imagine a regular person playing games or editing the family photos or editing the kid's birthday party videos aren't using multiple cores for almost everything they do.

Even browsing the web these days uses multiple cores.

Apple wouldn't have made the investment if people couldn't see and feel real world results.

GNU gold was doing threaded linking 15 years ago, and nowadays threaded linking is the default for new linkers like LLVM's lld. Unless you use very specific GNU linker hacks, there aren't any reason to not use lld, it works fine for linking large software like LLVM/Clang, Qt, ffmpeg...

Although hardware specific software from Apple is probably a big part of that draw too. I don't think we're ever going to see Linux prioritize a certain hardware and put in the effort to make it integrate as well as macs does.

For comparison you can check the progress of Linux on iPhones (which is actually a thing!)

Mainline Linux support requires a lot of work from vendors. Check out the ARM SoC Linux market for an abundance of examples of this problem. Many of the devices will be forever stuck an old kernel fork and will never run a mainline kernel.

When it comes to ARM SoCs, Linux requires vendor support to get it running. If you want mainline kernel support, that requires even more work that many vendors just aren't providing.

A locked bootloader is just one issue to overcome for Linux support. A lot of the real issues come down to the lack of an enumerable bus on ARM SoCs, along with a lack of drivers.

Without vendor support from Apple to support Linux, these devices will be like the millions of iPhones and iPads that don't run Linux and will never run Linux.

Most ARM SoCs that are sold explicitly as mini Linux computers also have this problem. Many of them are stuck on old kernel forks, because vendors didn't give the proper support their SoCs needed to run a mainline Linux kernel.

tl;dr: For Linux to be a viable option on Apple's SoCs, Apple needs to put in a lot of work to explicitly support Linux. Without that vendor support, you will never be able to download a Linux ISO and install it like you can on an x86 Mac.

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 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.

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

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

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.

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 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.

Reminds me of this story: https://www.theregister.com/2018/04/16/amd_ceo_f1/

I am worried about the other hardware and MacOSX being total POS right now.

Oh, definitely. But the Linux (or alternate OS) fans are not really on Apple's radar. OTOH, they do a good job of keeping some core binaries up-to-date, like zsh and Vim, and they did appeal about getting good compile times during the M1 release event, so they consider POSIX users part of their target market.

Rather, they foresee OS X becoming a system where you can't run programs that haven't received Apple's blessing and been brought through Apple's store. Blessings that will be denied to software like youtube-dl.

As to why they would do this? A combination of the good of most users, who will enjoy protection from malware and viruses; and the irresistible temptation of a 30% cut of all sales.

Tablet dominated world never materialized.

Post PC era isn't here, the PC is dominant still. Even iPad Pro got laptop like, than any laptop got iPad like. iPad's sales are either stalling or declining.

Yes - Apple clearly wants to keep that laptop market and be general enough to be useful. But general purpose is for general public, not your average HN reader.

Also even if you liberate a single device, it does not mean all your hack will work on the next one - it's a never ending battle. And without making sure manufacturers actually respect some standards such as they do on x86, it might become a loosing battle long term...

They're not going to remove the ability to run arbitrary code or the unix core. There would literally be no reason to buy a mac over another product of theirs.

I was literally making the point that these rumours have persisted for years and nothing has ever come of it.

I couldn’t agree more with the rest of your comment!

And that's the reason why Apple is reaping these benefits, while moving to ARM is completely at odds with what Microsoft stands for and promises i.e. long term software backwards compatibility.

Not really. Why would you compare against old rivals instead of the current market? They had 1660 Ti's on the charts, too, which both obliterated the M1 & are not at all the high-end of discreet mobile GPUs.

The "discreet rival" was because the M1 was competing favorably against the discreet 1650 & 560(X). As in, entry-level discreet GPUs make increasingly less sense (they already weren't making much sense with Intel's new Xe and AMD's Vega 8 & 11 integrated, but more nails in that coffin with the M1)

Anandtech numbers showed 50-89% of total power consumption for the 7601 being used for Infinity Fabric. With 89w remaining spread among 32 cores, that's a mere 2.78w per core or 1.39w per thread at an all-core turbo of 2.7GHz.

Oh, I'd note that the 7601 is a 14nm Zen 1 part.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/13124/the-amd-threadripper-29...!

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 )

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

In the Apple ecosystem, a $1000 laptops are low-end devices.

The iMac Pro [1] and the Mac Pro [2] are high-end, professional level machines. The iMac Pro starts at $5,000; the Mac Pro at $6000.

The biggest difference is that Apple doesn't sell commodity hardware that virtually every PC OEM does. That was a deliberate choice many years ago.

BTW, the M1 Mac mini starts at $699 and blows away all the PCs in it's class, including those that cost more.

Some Hollywood studios have already talked about replacing much more expensive computers with the Mac mini because it's so fast [3]. No joke.

To be clear, you're not going to render a full-length movie in 4k on an M1-based Mac mini—that's what the Mac Pro is for. But for less demanding 4k editing tasks that would have been unthinkable on an under $1000 machine a year ago, certainly.

[1]: https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/imac-pro

[2]: https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/mac-pro

[3]: Hollywood thinks new Mac mini 'could be huge' for video editors: https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/11/12/hollywood-thinks-...