Apple M4 Mac Mini with macOS vs. Intel / AMD with Ubuntu Linux Performance

Sad to see that Phoronix has the worst advertisement experience that you can have on mobile now: Full page deceptive interscreen, banniers that randomly popup from the top and from the bottom messing up with the layout, mini video showing up totally in the middle of page on top of text with a 1 micrometer sized close button to send you to DoubleClick redirect when you try to close it.

Also with the multiple page article designed to maximize the page view count...

M4 raw performance compilation from the article for my future self.

Sorted by result.

Note: M4 wins by a landslide when it comes to perf/watt but performs poorly in terms of raw performance for these benchmarks.

Note to self: Keep working with a beefy x86 workstation because time is valuable.

FLAC encoding: best

Compiling FFmpeg: average

Compiling LLVM: average

C-Ray 2.0 1080p: average

C-Ray 2.0 4k: average

Zstd compression: second worst

Zstd decompression: second worst

7-Zip compression: worst

7-Zip decompression: worst

Appleseed 2.0: worst

V-RAY 6.0: worst

IndigoBench: worst

QuantLib: worst

Apache HTTP Server: worst

DuckDB: worst

PyBench: worst

x265: worst

Kavazaar 2.2: worst

AVIF encoding: worst

JPEG-XL encoding: worst

Why does the Tech Press avoid doing any Integrated GPU Accelerated Blender 3D Cycles rendering tests as the Apple M series SOCs support that. And that's faster and uses less power than any Cycles CPU rendering that's slower and more power hungry.

Now the x86 SOCs have really Poor iGPU compute API support and Blender 3D 3.0/later editions have no support for OpenCL as the Blender Foundation decided to drop that OpenCL support long ago where Blender 3D's iGPU/dGPU compute API support is mostly via Nvidia's CUDA or Apple's Metal mostly.

But What About Intel's OneAPI/Level-0 and AMD's ROCm/HIP and the tech press never really looks into why for AMD that ROCm/HIP is not really supported for AMD's Integrated Graphics and I have not seen anyone doing any testing of Intel's OneAPI/Level-0 for any iGPU accelerated Blender 3D Cycles rendering.

Apple's iGPUs on their M series processors are well supported for non gaming graphics applications for the most part but what about the x86 makers iGPUs and Blender 3D's iGPU accelerated cycles rendering should be on a regular roster of testing.

Why is there so much fragmentation now for Integrated Graphics and some Standard iGPU compute API and OpenCL was supposed to be the cross platform answer to that but really long before there was any Apple M series processors OpenCL never really progressed much on Linux and Apple moved on to using Metal while Nvidia has always favored its CUDA Graphics and Compute API.

But the Phoronix Automated test suite has more tests than then ones that Phoronix has chosen to list in the Article so there's usually a link to the remainder of the tests and I'd rather there be some iGPU testing done as that's being ignored for the most part in favor of mostly CPU cores testing as if the iGPUs on the processors do not even exist! And there's quite a bit more FP compute on the makers respective iGPUs that can come in handy for more than just Gaming workloads!

> Once Asahi Linux is up and running on the M4 devices reasonably well, > I'll be eager to run some 1:1 Linux benchmarks.

What would be the point of running these benchmarks on Asahi? It would be only a benchmark of Asahi itself, nothing else.

It'd be more helpful if each benchmark lists whether it has Rosetta translation and if not, does it have ARM instruction optimization.

The M4 might be brute forcing these applications, while Intel and AMD have x86 specific instruction optimizations.

So ... performance-wise results seem to be quite apart from Intel/AMD?