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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thunng8 - Sunday, November 22, 2020 - link
What are the cinebench results of the 4800u running at 15w. All I see is the 4800u running benchmark it is well over 40w.For example here: https://www.notebookcheck.net/The-Ryzen-7-4800U-is...
Power usage peaks at 57w and in games the laptop maintains 49w indefinitely. That is very very far from 15w.
Anandtech has actually test the m1 with fan in the mini and it uses 15w in cinebench and scores 7700. The non active cooled MacBook Air uses 7w when thermally throttled (this is in the 30min run) and scores approx 6000
BushLin - Sunday, November 22, 2020 - link
notebookcheck are testing a 4800U in 25W mode and stressing CPU+GPU simultaneously.Here's accurate charts of the 4800U in 15W mode.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16084/intel-tiger-l...
thunng8 - Sunday, November 22, 2020 - link
Here is some actual figures for a Renoir system.https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/new-apple-soc...
Constrained to 25w, it score 6600.
While m1 scores 7700 at 15w.
https://twitter.com/i/web/status/13287773335122780...
The 4800u would be using 40w+ to outperform the m1 at 15w.
BushLin - Sunday, November 22, 2020 - link
Results are for a different, 4700U CPU, posted by some random person.Why not simply look at the results from the article you're leaving a comment on? Which are more likely to be taken under controlled conditions.
thunng8 - Sunday, November 22, 2020 - link
I am looking for actual performance results at 15w, not boosted to 40w or higher which all 4800u seems to do.BushLin - Sunday, November 22, 2020 - link
Didn't take much effort to find the 15W M1 and 15W 4800U have very similar power draw, if that's what you're actually looking for.They both boost above their rated power in a similar way.
https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph16252/119...
https://images.anandtech.com/doci/16084/Power%20-%...
thunng8 - Sunday, November 22, 2020 - link
I was looking for specific cinebench results which you alluded to was running faster than M1 while using the same power. The few videos I have seen shows the 4800U laptops fan spinning up to maximum over most of the entire Cinebench 10min run while the M1 fans (in the macbook pro) was not audible and the air has no fan at all.BushLin - Monday, November 23, 2020 - link
https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph16252/119...Ppietra - Monday, November 23, 2020 - link
BushLinBut those aren’t the real power draw numbers for the M1 and 4800U laptops in the tests. The 4800U 15W is just a reference, no measurements were made for the power consumption during Cinebench. The 4800U can draw much more power than 15W.
As for the Mac mini the power draw shown is for the all computer, not just the processor. If you had bothered reading thunng8 links you would see that M1 power consumption probably tops at 15W during Cinebench.
I have seen tests where a 4800U laptop consumes almost 3 times more power than a MacBook Pro with a M1 chip, during Cinebench. It’s the power consumption of the laptops not the chips but the difference is gigantic.
BushLin - Tuesday, November 24, 2020 - link
The power measurement for both systems is at the wall rather than just the SoC and the numbers available from this site, under controlled conditions, show a similar power draw under a multithreaded workload. There is a difference in depending on factors like AVX instructions but the 4800U in 15W mode is demonstrably pulling similar amounts of power to an M1 in 15W mode running a similar workload.The 4800U can be run in a higher, 25W power mode but not on the pages I've linked as it wasn't used to get the cinebench results on this article.