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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Rrrumble - Tuesday, January 25, 2022 - link
You may have missed the part where apple started the "business" (the smart phone, with the iPod as a first step) and grew and expanded it with savvy products and marketing while others tried catch up.Henry 3 Dogg - Friday, November 27, 2020 - link
"...Apple have tonnes of free cash that they could use to buy something they don't really need that makes money, but they don't do it. Instead they buy back their own stock. ..."Not true. Yes, Apple does buy back their own stock but they also have a subsidiary called Braeburn Capital which is sitting on around $250 Billion worth of investments.
theonetruestripes - Tuesday, December 1, 2020 - link
Apple _likes_ focus. When I worked there SJ made the point that Apple had incredible brand loyalty, but making some products that "make money" but are not as good as the rest of the products damages that brand loyalty. That seems pretty obvious to me at the time. Th other point he made is projects cost attention. If Apple launched a line of drink bottles it would take his time, designers time, marketing time, and many others. Some of that you can "just hire" if you have enough money, but you can't "just hire" more hours into the CEO's day, or SVP's days.To a certain extent that might not matter for something as distant from Apple's core business as say owning a CPU design firm. If Apple bought ARM and the ARM reference designs are "meh" very few people will decide that means the new MacBook Pro is "meh" by association. However it would still require some CEO time to decide "this new ARM subsidiary can't be called anything Apple related, and needs to make sure nobody is allowed to buy products from them and claim they are Apple related - we absolutely don't want a new "Apple Powered Dell" marketing campaign anywhere!"; how much money is that time worth? I'm sure there is some number at which you could say "if buying ARM makes this much per year it is worth 300 hours of Tim's time to close the deal and 16 hours per Q to make sure it doesn't screw anything up", but it may be a much higher number then ARM actually generates.
(or it might not, I expect a large part of Apple not being excited about buying ARM is lack of likelihood of getting regulatory approval, likelihood of needing to appear before congress to defend the purchase if in fact it is approved, and lack of any meaningful value to Apple (i.e. Apple has all the ARM license it needs to do anything it decides to))
alysdexia - Monday, December 28, 2020 - link
cares !-> they; 1 != 2; and you liardysonlu - Sunday, February 21, 2021 - link
If Apple buys Arm, not only does it have to keep licensing out Arm's designs but it may risk being forced to license its own CPU design/innovation as well since with Apple+Arm being a single entity, there is no longer any distinction in CPU intellectual properties between the two companies.Henry 3 Dogg - Friday, November 27, 2020 - link
Apple owned 43% of ARM for several years. There are more reasons than licensing technology to buy a all or part of a company.There are some very good reasons why Apple might choose to own 20% of ARM.
danbob999 - Tuesday, November 17, 2020 - link
Actually it's the opposite. It's the cheapeast/narrowest license from ARM. More expensive license include access to full Cortex cores, and not only instruction set.Spiderman10 - Tuesday, November 17, 2020 - link
No helios24 is correct. The Arch. license is at the top of the licensing pyramid. Anandtech actually wrote a piece about this here: https://www.anandtech.com/show/7112/the-arm-diarie...ws3 - Tuesday, November 17, 2020 - link
Danbob is confused by the fact that Apple doesn't use the ARM designs. He assumes that lack of use results from lack of access.RedGreenBlue - Tuesday, November 17, 2020 - link
They still based some designs closely to the generic ones. I think the A7 was shown to be only slightly modified in Anandtech’s review (the first 64-bit with Arm-v8(?))