The 2020 Mac Mini Unleashed: Putting Apple Silicon M1 To The Test
by Andrei Frumusanu on November 17, 2020 9:00 AM ESTConclusion & First Impressions
Today’s piece was less of a review on the new Mac mini as it was testing out Apple’s new M1 chip. We’ve had very little time with the device but hopefully were able to manage to showcase the key aspects of the new chip, and boy, it’s impressive.
For years now we’ve seen Apple’s custom CPU microarchitecture in A-series phone SoCs post impressive and repeated performance jumps generation after generation, and it today’s new Apple Silicon devices are essentially the culmination of the inevitable trajectory that Apple has been on.
In terms of power, the Apple M1 inside of the new Mac mini fills up a thermal budget up to around 20-24W from the SoC side. This is still clearly a low-power design, and Apple takes advantage of that to implement it into machines such as the now fan-less Macbook Air. We haven’t had opportunity to test that device yet, but we expect the same peak performance, although with more heavy throttling once the SoC saturates the heat dissipation of that design.
In the new Macbook Pro, we expect the M1 to showcase similar, if not identical performance to what we’ve seen on the new Mac mini. Frankly, I suspect Apple could have down-sized the Mini, although we don’t exactly now the internal layout of the piece as we weren’t allowed to disassemble it.
The performance of the new M1 in this “maximum performance” design with a small fan is outstandingly good. The M1 undisputedly outperforms the core performance of everything Intel has to offer, and battles it with AMD’s new Zen3, winning some, losing some. And in the mobile space in particular, there doesn’t seem to be an equivalent in either ST or MT performance – at least within the same power budgets.
What’s really important for the general public and Apple’s success is the fact that the performance of the M1 doesn’t feel any different than if you were using a very high-end Intel or AMD CPU. Apple achieving this in-house with their own design is a paradigm shift, and in the future will allow them to achieve a certain level of software-hardware vertical integration that just hasn’t been seen before and isn’t achieved yet by anybody else.
The software side of things already look good on day 1 due to Apple’s Rosetta2. Whilst the software doesn’t offer the best the hardware can offer, with time, as developers migrate their applications to native Apple Silicon support, the ecosystem will flourish. And in the meantime, the M1 is fast enough that it can absorb the performance hit from Rosetta2 and still deliver solid performance for all but the most CPU-critical x86 applications.
For developers, the Apple Silicon Macs also represent the very first full-fledged Arm machines on the market that have few-to-no compromises. This is a massive boost not just for Apple, but for the larger Arm ecosystem and the growing Arm cloud-computing business.
Overall, Apple hit it out of the park with the M1.
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Kuhar - Wednesday, November 18, 2020 - link
You are wrong. This is literally Apple`s ONLY chip. So I can say it is the highest end chip.TEAMSWITCHER - Wednesday, November 18, 2020 - link
Not for long...Hrunga_Zmuda - Wednesday, November 18, 2020 - link
It's not a chip. It's an SOC. But be that as it may, Apple is literally using multiple chips right now, and they are going to be replacing their whole line right up to the Mac Pro. People think the Mac is small potatoes, but it's the equivalent of a Fortune 500 company. It just looks small because of how massive the iOS ecosystem is. They will easily make money just fine with the whole line updated to the M system. Why? Because Apple doesn't have to sell anything to other companies, so every single thing they make doesn't have to make money by itself. So the Mac Pro's processor might not make a profit itself, but the Mac Pro will.Spunjji - Thursday, November 19, 2020 - link
"Is" is not the same as "will be"Reading comprehension in the comments is not strong.
Spunjji - Tuesday, November 17, 2020 - link
Oh dear. Please don't blame the graphs - or, indeed, the author - when they show you something you didn't want to see.What you see here is extremely competitive performance, that AMD may well exceed when they get to 5nm - but they're not there just yet. For the end-user, what counts is what you can get.
AMD need to get their chips into more designs and with any luck they will; Intel can't bribe away a performance advantage like Zen 3 has forever.
markiz - Thursday, November 19, 2020 - link
For the end-user is not really relevant for this particular discussion, I think?I think the discussion is "philosophical" in nature, as in are there intrinsic differences and advantages of one over the other?
E.g., can AMD (or Intel, or Qualcomm) in lets say 2 years offer a SOC as efficeint and as performant as apple can?
So as to say, is it a matter of time, is that time reasonable, or is it unsurmountable?
If I knew Qualcomm will offer a comparable snapdragon in 2022 (and MS sorts the emulation issues), or if AMD will offer comparable chip in 2022, i am good, and would pick from a wastly wider pool of hw designs of windows ecosystem. I like convertibles.
If on the other hand this time frame is larger, or if they will never offer either the efficiency or performance, I would switch to apple all be damned.
BushLin - Thursday, November 19, 2020 - link
..."can AMD (or Intel, or Qualcomm) in lets say 2 years offer a SOC as efficeint and as performant as apple can?"AMD have a comparable chip available now in performance and power, been out for ages and it's in the benchmarks. If you need your system to do some actual work, the 4800U is a better chip. If your workload doesn't scale to many threads and the software is available for the new ARM platform then Apple's silicon looks pretty sweet.
haghands - Tuesday, November 17, 2020 - link
Copeadt6247 - Tuesday, November 17, 2020 - link
The parts that beat the M1 have way more cores, a higher thermal budget, and higher clock.There's a lot of things to optimize for, and in its current form, Apple silicon doesn't offer solutions to all desktop workflows -- number of PCIe lanes comes to mind as a limitation.
AMD isn't wholly beaten, but they're also not playing the same game. The best thing to come out of this would be lighting a fire under AMD's butt.
But AMD will be chasing higher IPC and performance per watt, while Apple will be chasing higher core counts, higher thermal and power budget for desktop parts, and higher clocks. I'm hoping Intel is going to rebound with competitive parts in a couple years. Competition makes everyone better!
BushLin - Tuesday, November 17, 2020 - link
Er... Similar power drawn by old zen 2 design at 7nm which is giving better multithreaded performance.