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
No,with this:
https://twitter.com/i/web/status/13287773335122780...
anandtech author’s twitter account, something that for some reason you have refused to read!
amazing how you cannot distinguish between processor power consumption and machine power consumption.
Nicon0s - Monday, November 30, 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!"LoL, you only linked to unprofessional, amateurish video. Nobody in their right mind would try to suggest that a video like that is conclusive in terms of how efficient a 4800U chip is.
Nicon0s - Monday, November 30, 2020 - link
"Didn’t measure the power draw? Really?Yeas, really. You have so clear perception problems.
Nicon0s - Monday, November 30, 2020 - link
Exactly, quite a flawed way of comparing processor efficiency, also he didn't even test the laptops until the end to see is the power is lost progressively on all laptops.Nicon0s - Monday, November 30, 2020 - link
"Sorry, but no!"WoW, some apple fanboys here are really dense.
Also recommending an amator youtuber, that was cringey.
Pacinamac - Saturday, November 21, 2020 - link
I am smiling know who had huge involvement in the development of M1...You all know who I am talking about...
Anand. :)
GeoffreyA - Sunday, November 22, 2020 - link
My brother and I were talking about the same thing a week or two ago. I reckon he's been giving Apple advice/guidance on this whole matter. Someone who can see the whole forest in one fell swoop, but understands the wood and bark as well. "The Enemy is moving with their armies of Zen, while the Coves of Sunny languish in the Lakes of Ice, under spell of the Willow Lady. The hero Rocket is detained in the Lost Fields of 14. Now, now is the time to strike with the M1, smiting down the Free Peoples of PC-earth, while the wind speaketh the language of ARM." ;)GeoffreyA - Sunday, November 22, 2020 - link
On a serious note, I think he's been giving the CPU team a bit of design advice too.Anyhow, it would be great to hear an update from him, even if it were just a personal one, telling us how he's doing.
Tomatotech - Sunday, November 29, 2020 - link
He can’t. A lot of contracts specify absolutely no talking to media (which would include Anandtech) without corporate approval. For someone coming from a journalist background, even running a personal blog might raise eyebrows as it is ‘public media’. I don’t like it, but many non-Apple companies are sensitive and paranoid about this kind of thing. I can only imagine it 100x worse at Apple.Tomatotech - Sunday, November 29, 2020 - link
To add, even if he got corporate approval for a screened interview / statement, it almost certainly couldn’t be with AnandTech. Apple / others might see that as unduly favouring one media outlet because he has personal history with AnandTech. The choice of outlet has to be done by someone else, choosing for professional reason, and fitting in with Apple’s media strategy.