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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Spunjji - Thursday, November 19, 2020 - link
Their 8-core Tiger won't come in under 45W.hanskey - Wednesday, November 18, 2020 - link
Yeah.Apple is generally only relevant to users with more money than sense historically, and this is why their PC market share is a joke and their tablet and phone market share are ever shrinking - because they are not competitively priced.
Generally speaking, Apple products are for computer-device users who are not very tech savvy and who do not seek the best total-cost-of-ownership for their performance requirements, easily swayed by "the cool factor", and who also don't mind vendor lock in, the lack of reasonable pricing for minor upgrades, expensive repairs, and giving control over to Apple to decide what software you get to use. These are all problems for the vast majority of computer device users, which in addition to being very overpriced are why long term Apple just gets less relevant with each passing year.
A nice CPU for some use-cases will not solve for any of that, I'm afraid. Don't get me wrong, I'm a CPU architecture nerd and they've impressively reached close to single-threaded feature parity with some of the neatest bits I can think of, but it remains to be seen if these cores can scale as they have been, but none of that matters like it would if VIA or a Chinese x86 manufacturer did they same on an open platform, because of Apple's terrible business practices.
Upsider - Wednesday, November 18, 2020 - link
Had to log in to thank you for this. I needed the laugh today!KoolAidMan1 - Wednesday, November 18, 2020 - link
People on day one are literally running 12k raw video files with no drops, beyond Apple's example of running 8k video with no stutter in DaVinci Resolve. Their bottom end chip is performing as well as or better than Intel-based systems that cost twice as much, but yeah, its for more people with money than sense.Cope.
blackcrayon - Wednesday, November 18, 2020 - link
"Generally speaking, Apple products are for computer-device users who are not very tech savvy"Must be why Google uses them. And that UNIX shell. Another non tech savvy user feature. The vast majority of desktop users use Windows PCs. And 99% of them design their own computers from scratch, then write software to run on top of it.
You should be ashamed of yourself.
Silver5urfer - Friday, November 20, 2020 - link
Googleers are the worst fools of Software development, they are chasing the same garbage Macbook system of Locked garbage and fake privacy features, the Android OS is rotting from inside out, they are shaking up fundamentals such as filesystem support to a sandboxed garbage Scoped Storage mess with SAF framework on top, their Chromebooks are utter garbage. The OS doesn't even have Native Apps it uses Android yet they don't have SD card access properly, the machine cannot boot into other OSes properly as well. The UI is a mess and it is made for the literal non tech savvy users just need a basic computer - Like Kids, that's why in US many schools got them and they were very cheap too.Coming to MS, same the Windows 10 UX is a mess because the garbage OS looks like a mobile OS first and then they are killing the information density to accomodate the touch screen system they could simply made 2 UX options on first boot but they don't and on top they kill Control Panel and more desktop centric system with the sub par Metro UI/Fluent system which puts lot of emphasis on the ugly design on top of the least productive workflow with the OS in terms of a Desktop OS. Their Surface Books are same trash like that they use Intel but the problem is they gate every single BIOS control with zero user tweak option and they added S mode and all sorts of garbage to block exe but it failed so backtracked on top. They are going in the same walled garden utopian approach of WaaS, As a Service unstable mess of an OS with every 6 months of hell with a beta for a damn Desktop OS and using Home version userbase as guniea pigs.
Google gets the prize since their Pixel was an iPhone clone from day 1, they aped the iPhone 6 design with Pixel made by HTC, and then advertised 3.5mm jack but axed it with Pixel 2 and with Pixel 3 that Insane notch got a copy paste to the 3XL with the world's worst notch ever, and then with Pixel 4 they yanked the HW so bad that it doesn't get proper battery missing ton of features, their Software is subpar beta and their Apps like Pixel recorder where one records the Sound one cannot even see them on the storage thanks to Scoped disaster storage they have to hit share that level of copying is going on at Google fools and then the best part, their marketshare since 5 generations - less than 3%, which is less than Huawei which was blocked by CFIUS, that share of Huawei was through Honor.
Ofc you are not even capable of understanding all of this but again say something like that you said to the OP. Keep it up inb4 others come and try, google Scoped Storage Commonsware and then if you understand then we can talk.
Spunjji - Monday, November 23, 2020 - link
Would love to see Silver5urfer's posts run through analysis software and compared to Quantumz0d. Even if they're not the same person, the overlap is fascinating.Spunjji - Thursday, November 19, 2020 - link
One of my most frugal developer friends codes on an ancient MacBook Air. But sure. 😂Sandbo - Sunday, November 22, 2020 - link
And the history has been history with M1, actually. You can try to show me a laptop with the performance of MacAir base model while maintaining the same battery life.RAM is one limit but for lots of people who only use the laptop for web browsing and maybe zoom, like students, this is the no brainer laptop to me.
Xanadu1977 - Wednesday, November 18, 2020 - link
It would interesting to see (if ever) and Arm based CPU could be paired with a discrete high end GPU from AMD or Nvidia like a 6800xt, 2060 super, 3070 or better.