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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Ppietra - Tuesday, November 24, 2020 - link
Sorry, but no! What you showed for the 4800U isn’t the power draw of the computer, it’s the power draw of a processor doing a completely different test in an unnamed computer in unknown settings. Not to mention that this M1 analysis is with a desktop computer not a laptop. Why are you trying to deceive?If you want to see computer power consumption go to Tally Ho Tech youtube channel, you will see how a laptop with the 4800U consumes around 3 times more in Cinebench than a laptop with a M1 chip.
BushLin - Tuesday, November 24, 2020 - link
Oh... I have to wade through some random YouTube channel to see some other flawed comparison? If you can link to an objective test showing actual power draw, post the link.Ppietra - Tuesday, November 24, 2020 - link
hmmm! So you complain about a channel doing a straightforward comparison in similar conditions, but you have no problems in using different kinds of power consumption from completely different tests to validate your "theory". Grand!!For the record thunng8 links shows you the power consumption of the M1 in a Cinebench test done by Anandtech’ author.
BushLin - Tuesday, November 24, 2020 - link
No, I'm continuing to complain that you don't post a link to your evidence, I'm not sitting through every YouTube video of some random when in the next breath you refer again to a forum post linked by thunng8 which is for a different, 4700U CPU.No amount of FUD changes the fact that the M1 is great at single thread, especially for the power but isn't the Jesus CPU you dream it to be in multithreaded workloads.
Put up or shut up.
Ppietra - Tuesday, November 24, 2020 - link
I have said nothing about a 4700U CPU nor referred to links to talk about AMD CPUs. I very clearly only mentioned M1 data when referring to thunng8 links. Neither have I said that the M1 had the highest performance of all, I only talked about power consumption.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuvZQOUDCKY
BushLin - Tuesday, November 24, 2020 - link
Great YouTube video, didn't measure the power draw. Yet you're the one throwing around words like deceive.Ppietra - Tuesday, November 24, 2020 - link
Didn’t measure the power draw? Really?So showing battery level change after 10 minute Cinebench test, with known battery capacities, isn’t sufficient data to determine approximate power draw? Not even enough to give you an idea? A little bit of basic math, then!
16% drop in a 60.7Wh battery gives 9.7Wh of energy use for the AMD laptop. If you prefer in watts, since it was a 10 minute run that gives 58W.
6% drop in a 58Wh battery gives 3.5Wh of energy used for the MacBook Pro. In a 10 minute run that gives 21W, to do the same task.
From a previous video the Cinebench MT scores were 9976 for AMD and 7800 for the MacBook.
If you normalize energy consumption to the Cinebench score, that would mean the MacBook Pro consumes less than half for the same performance!
BushLin - Tuesday, November 24, 2020 - link
What are the cinebench results when running on battery? What is the battery's actual capacity and how fast does it drain when fully loaded? How does the system report battery percentage vs voltage of the cells? How much power does the screen consume? Can you trust the person making the video to be thorough and objective?Could go on and on, or just stick a $15 meter on the AC plug and actually measure it.
Ppietra - Tuesday, November 24, 2020 - link
?? I gave you the Cinebench results. I gave the actual battery capacity, I gave how much it drained when running Cinebench and in what time interval - it is all in the videos!How much power does the screen consume??? REALLY!!!? For someone who argued for the use of "power measurement" "at the wall rather than just the SoC " to now come and argue against measuring the battery power drain in a 10 minutes test it is laughable. Even more so when in the end you make another U turn and just argue about measuring power at the plug - so the screen doesn’t matter now!??
Just face reality M1 power consumption has been measured at 15W in Cinebench, by Anandtech. 4800U power consumption can go higher than 25W since it can be boosted to 35W.
BushLin - Tuesday, November 24, 2020 - link
Since you're either a troll or insane, I'm not going to expend any further effort beyond answering this:"Just face reality M1 power consumption has been measured at 15W in Cinebench, by Anandtech"
With this:
https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph16252/119...