The 2020 Mac Mini Unleashed: Putting Apple Silicon M1 To The Test
by Andrei Frumusanu on November 17, 2020 9:00 AM ESTBenchmarks: Whatever Is Available
As we’ve had very little time with the Mac mini, and the fact that this not only is a macOS system, but a new Arm64-based macOS system, our usual benchmark choices that we tend to use aren’t really available to us. We’ve made due with a assortment of available tests at the time of the launch to give us a rough idea of the performance:
One particular benchmark that sees the first light of day on macOS as well as Apple Silicon is Cinebench. In this first-time view of the popular Cinema4D based benchmark, we see the Apple M1 toe-to-toe with the best-performing x86 CPUs on the market, vastly outperforming past Apple iterations of Intel silicon. The M1 here loses out to Zen3 and Tiger Lake CPUs, which still seem to have an advantage, although we’re not sure of the microarchitectural characteristics of the new benchmark.
What’s notable is the performance of the Rosetta2 run of the benchmark when in x86 mode, which is not only able to keep up with past Mac iterations but still also beat them.
In the multi-threaded R23 runs, the M1 absolutely dominates past Macs with similar low-power CPUs. Just as of note, we’re trying to gather more data on other systems as we have access to them, and expand the graph in further updates of the article past publishing.
In browser-benchmarks we’ve known Apple’s CPUs to very much dominate across the landscape, but there were doubts as to whether this was due to the CPUs themselves in the iPhone or rather just the browsers and browser engines. Now running on macOS and desktop Safari, being able to compare data to other Intel Mac systems, we can come to the conclusion that the performance advantage is due to Apple’s CPU designs.
Web-browsing performance seems to be an extremely high priority for Apple’s CPU, and this makes sense as it’s the killer workload for mobile SoCs and the workload that one uses the most in everyday life.
In Geekbench 5, the M1 does again extremely well as it actually takes the lead in our performance figures. Even when running in x86 compatibility mode, the M1 is able to match the top single-threaded performance of last generation’s high-end CPUs, and vastly exceed that of past iterations of the Mac mini and past Macbooks.
Multi-threaded performance is a matter of core-count and power efficiency of a design. The M1 here demolishes a 2017 15-inch Macbook Pro with an Intel i7-7820HQ with 4 cores and 8 threads, posting over double the score. We’ll be adding more data-points as we collect them.
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Vik32 - Wednesday, November 18, 2020 - link
Andrei, thanks for the work done! Great review as always.tyger11 - Wednesday, November 18, 2020 - link
Ouch. Thanks for the work on the article, but it's time to use an editor again; this was a painful read.marrakech - Wednesday, November 18, 2020 - link
blackmagic has an test for raw video stuffhttps://i.imgur.com/ISL1mbf.png
m1 test is legit from an user
take a lock at the right where it Says cpu and then 3:1 ,5:1 or 8:1
i compare Braw3:1 at 8K and 6K
m1 scored 14 at 8K and 22 at 6K
amd mobile chip gets 26 at 8K and 42 at 6K
apple did good making an chip for its os and paacking an fast ssd on the macbooks
the new os and the way the gpu talks to the system is no where else to be found just on the new mackbooks
its like an lamburghini 0 to 60 vs tesla ludacris stuff , its different
samerakhras - Wednesday, November 18, 2020 - link
Looks like a paid review by Apple.CineBench R23
when it is about single thread it is compared aganst 5950X
and in Multi thread suddenly the Ryzen 5950X disappears and only 4900HS is there ..
Yea Right !
mjtomlin71 - Wednesday, November 18, 2020 - link
He's testing for two different things:1. Single core performance across the spectrum... this tells you about raw performance.
2. Multi core performance in a low'ish watt design... this tells you about efficiency.
No one is trying to say the M1 has the best performing CPU in the world. There's no contest when it comes to multicore performance; the M1 can't touch those other CPUs. So the second test, is to see how well it performs against high end "mobile" designs.
samerakhras - Wednesday, November 18, 2020 - link
Sorry , he is trying to say M1 is competing with everything. and in the earlier article he was hinting at that as well . and his narrative as well.Thats why in single thread he put all chips and in multi threads he put only the lower ones.
I never seen in all my life Anandtech site fall that much. and becomes Paid like others.
Silver5urfer - Thursday, November 19, 2020 - link
As long as they are paid and look at the comments, all over the place on the M1 being ultra fast, same for other MSM sites like Ars, and etc. Glorying it to the moon.Spunjji - Thursday, November 19, 2020 - link
Weird, because a huge chunk of the comments are you trying to rules-lawyer your way out of admitting that Apple made a surprisingly good chip.The idea that Ars and AnandTech are "MSM" is *chef's kiss*.
Spunjji - Thursday, November 19, 2020 - link
Your inability to read correctly does not signify an error on the part of the person who wrote the article. You just had it explained to you and you're still substituting your own absurd conspiracy theory. That's not a great look.samerakhras - Wednesday, November 18, 2020 - link
oh and one more thing ,This is a MAC MINI , not a notebook , you can install a full 65 watts desktop CPU in that case and will work fine.