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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Zagor Te Nay - Sunday, November 22, 2020 - link
Unrelated to how good M1 is - and I think it is really darn good, and will only get better as devs start supporting it natively (although Rosetta 2 seems to be doing fine, all considered) - Intel is not hard to beat. AMD has done it with having much less money than Apple has.As someone said, Intel has stagnated themselves out of competition. They are more responsible for their own sad current situation than AMD or Apple, really.
Spunjji - Monday, November 23, 2020 - link
@Zagor Te Nay - I don't think the fact that AMD have finally clawed out a lead over Intel indicates that they're easy to beat.Nvidia had a crack at CPU design a while back and were forced to pack it in. Samsung have tried to out-engineer Apple with large ARM core designs and have failed. It's not clear whether Qualcomm can't compete or can't be *bothered* to compete, but they've never come within a year of Apple's designs and are usually around 18 months behind.
These are all large, wealthy, serious organisations. To be honest I'm impressed by Apple, and even more so by AMD.
beowulfey - Tuesday, November 17, 2020 - link
I mean, the point of benchmarks is to compare CPUs that are available today, right?In the hypothetical future where Zen 4 is comparable to an M1, I would counter that by then the latest Apple M3 or whatever will have improved as well, so...
Tams80 - Tuesday, November 17, 2020 - link
But Zen 2 is roughly comparable to the M1.No one is claiming that other future processors will only match the M1. Well, perhaps other than you in your imagination.
halo37253 - Tuesday, November 17, 2020 - link
M1 is slower than 4800u when it comes to multithread workloads. Even on these video compression tests.... While using slightly more power at most. 22watts vs 25watts while running cinebench...Zen3 mobile will be out before M2, and will most likely have no problems matching or beating M2 in nearly any task while using same amount of power. While being 7nm
Only reason why M1 is even remotely impressive is largely thanks to 5nm. Apple managed to compete with Zen 2 in terms of power efficiency with 5nm, even though Zen 2 is 7nm. This M1 chip is no more impressive than the 4800u in terms of Performance/watt. M1 just has higher single thread vs weaker multi thread....
Spunjji - Tuesday, November 17, 2020 - link
@halo36253 - have to disagree with you on that part. A 5nm process does not magically make a 3.2Ghz CPU act like one boosting north of 4Ghz. M1 is particularly impressive for power draw, which has a lot to do with that process, but it's also quite fast in its own right. Beating out Intel and duelling with a newly-resurgent AMD is an impressive showing for their first SoC designed for anything more than an iPad.It's also impressive that it is even on 5nm in the first place. It would have taken lots of work between designers and the foundry to pull that off a year before AMD will make the move.
halo37253 - Tuesday, November 17, 2020 - link
I probably was a little too critical.Yes the M1 deserves all the praise it can get. But some of that praise should be on TSMC, they are on fire. TSMC and Samsung have leapfrogged Intel. And Honestly if Intel's Fabs were able to keep up, this move to Arm would have been more questionable. I too think it made more sense to go with their own chip than risk the mac lineup with AMD processors.
I just wonder how well they can scale their Arm chips of, if they ever do. As if they ever really want to transition the Macbook pro 16, iMac or Macpro We need a Ryzen competitor. Intel was already behind in there areas and users have been wanting a high core count Mac for a long time now. Sadly the idea of running VMs on a Mac is looking grim.
Apple's Silicon is just what I figured it would be when it was allowed to actually suck power and stay cool. While the 22-25watt wall is most likely firmware enforced to keep the chip from pulling more power than designed for. GPU and CPU performance is top notch. This is what Arm should be. Now only if Apple and MS would work together to get windows for ARM working in bootcamp.
I just hope we one day see a 8-16 core M series chip from apple only packing high power cores. I'd love to see a ARM chip with a TDP of 65-95watts that doesn't consist of 100 cores.
Many people have been under the spell that Apple's silicon is somehow magically leagues above everyone else. They are no doubt good, and do give AMD a run for their Money. Funny to say that both AMD and Apple are making Intel look bad.
I've been wanting a ARM laptop for a long time now TBH. And been putting off getting the Wife a Macbook till these new ARM chips hit the market. Now I just need to hope MS works with Apple on getting Windows onto this. As as soon as windows for ARM allows for x64 apps to run, windows would be the choice for getting games running on these devices.
chris.parker@flipingreat.com - Tuesday, November 17, 2020 - link
Why Windows... ??? All apps can run Arm, windows is not something you run, its a desktop, that I personally practically never use. Applications, now that's what I use. MS has announced a native Arm M1 version of Office, and I am in 100%tuxRoller - Tuesday, November 17, 2020 - link
Oh yeah, this is far less critical🙄Eric S - Tuesday, November 17, 2020 - link
TSMC has been doing very well. Although remember that a lot of their work is financed by a cash infusion from Apple.