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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Eric S - Tuesday, November 17, 2020 - link
That cash is the reason Apple is getting so much of the 5 nm node production.varase - Wednesday, November 25, 2020 - link
You can pretty much forget Microsoft - there is no compelling ARM Microsoft software, and if ARM Windows does do x86 transcompiling it will almost certain be to the standard ARM instruction set, or worse to a Microsoft/Qualcomm mutated instruction set. In no case would it be the Apple SIlicon's AArch64 implantation.If they relied on interpretation instead of trans compilation, expect performance to be less than stellar.
Now Parallels seems to be working on something that they're keeping pretty mum about - my guess would be a hypervisor running x64 clients. Using Rosetta 2 like trans compilation, they could front end OS boot and segment loaders and read x64 code segments and return Apple Silicon AArch64 code to the client virtual machine. They'd probably have to front end code signing segments if those exist. To sustain performance, they'd also have to cache transcompiled code using a source/CRC/length key to prevent having to transcompile all the code all the time.
They wouldn't have Metal access to GPUs to lean back on, so unless Apple implements PCIe attached graphic cards I wouldn't expect gaming to ever be performant enough to be practical.
hlovatt - Tuesday, November 17, 2020 - link
Isn't the 22 W you quote for Apple for the whole system, whereas the 25 W you quote for AMD is just the processor? In't a 10 W Apple processor competitive with a 25 W AMD processor?halo37253 - Wednesday, November 18, 2020 - link
No thats full system power from the wall of AMD's 4800u in 15watt mode.whatthe123 - Tuesday, November 17, 2020 - link
By anandtech's standards these benchmarks are highly misleading, though. 5950x is capped off to its lowest possible package power. In MT testing they switch back to zen 2 chips also power limited. Everything is focusing on efficiency, which is admittedly very, very good, but the article frames it as though these are stock comparisons, when in reality most of these CPUs would be able to draw more power and dwarf the M1 in performance.If they are only looking at efficiency, why make such a misleading article? Just focus on efficiency and the results are stellar. Instead they went with this mess of an article, I'm honestly shocked considering this site normally tries to be unbiased as possible.
Spunjji - Thursday, November 19, 2020 - link
@whatthe123 - "5950x is capped off to its lowest possible package power" - where did you get that impression from?Spunjji - Thursday, November 19, 2020 - link
@whatthe123 - Regarding your complaint that they only compare the 5950X to the M1 in ST testing, of course they do, it's a 16-core 32-thread chip with a 105W TDP and ~140W power limit. It'll demolish the ~24W 4+4 M1 in MT. That's just... not a useful comparison.The point is to show AMD's peak Zen 3 performance against Apple's peak Firestorm performance. Once AMD have Zen 3 processors in the ~25W range, then a valid MT comparison in comparable designs can be made.
helpmeoutnow - Thursday, November 26, 2020 - link
@Spunjji but be fair we want to see the difference between this M1 and fully utilized 5950X just to see the real difference. Now it looks like m1 is a good cpu. but as it is said, they just cap everything else.Stephen_L - Tuesday, November 17, 2020 - link
Nah, no just listen to op, we HAVE to compare chips on the same node! Let’s wait for Intel 7nm also, hopefully in 2022 but god knows if they can do it before 2024, so we can have “Apples to apples comparison”. Let’s come back in 2-4 years guys. /smagreen - Tuesday, November 24, 2020 - link
Totally agree. The Cyrix M3 Jalapeno when it comes out on 5nm is going to crush this little M1.