The 2020 Mac Mini Unleashed: Putting Apple Silicon M1 To The Test
by Andrei Frumusanu on November 17, 2020 9:00 AM ESTBenchmarks: Whatever Is Available
As we’ve had very little time with the Mac mini, and the fact that this not only is a macOS system, but a new Arm64-based macOS system, our usual benchmark choices that we tend to use aren’t really available to us. We’ve made due with a assortment of available tests at the time of the launch to give us a rough idea of the performance:
One particular benchmark that sees the first light of day on macOS as well as Apple Silicon is Cinebench. In this first-time view of the popular Cinema4D based benchmark, we see the Apple M1 toe-to-toe with the best-performing x86 CPUs on the market, vastly outperforming past Apple iterations of Intel silicon. The M1 here loses out to Zen3 and Tiger Lake CPUs, which still seem to have an advantage, although we’re not sure of the microarchitectural characteristics of the new benchmark.
What’s notable is the performance of the Rosetta2 run of the benchmark when in x86 mode, which is not only able to keep up with past Mac iterations but still also beat them.
In the multi-threaded R23 runs, the M1 absolutely dominates past Macs with similar low-power CPUs. Just as of note, we’re trying to gather more data on other systems as we have access to them, and expand the graph in further updates of the article past publishing.
In browser-benchmarks we’ve known Apple’s CPUs to very much dominate across the landscape, but there were doubts as to whether this was due to the CPUs themselves in the iPhone or rather just the browsers and browser engines. Now running on macOS and desktop Safari, being able to compare data to other Intel Mac systems, we can come to the conclusion that the performance advantage is due to Apple’s CPU designs.
Web-browsing performance seems to be an extremely high priority for Apple’s CPU, and this makes sense as it’s the killer workload for mobile SoCs and the workload that one uses the most in everyday life.
In Geekbench 5, the M1 does again extremely well as it actually takes the lead in our performance figures. Even when running in x86 compatibility mode, the M1 is able to match the top single-threaded performance of last generation’s high-end CPUs, and vastly exceed that of past iterations of the Mac mini and past Macbooks.
Multi-threaded performance is a matter of core-count and power efficiency of a design. The M1 here demolishes a 2017 15-inch Macbook Pro with an Intel i7-7820HQ with 4 cores and 8 threads, posting over double the score. We’ll be adding more data-points as we collect them.
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Holliday75 - Tuesday, November 17, 2020 - link
I pray to the computer gaming gods that I do not have to purchase an Apple product 10 years from now.nandnandnand - Tuesday, November 17, 2020 - link
You might need to make a sacrifice while you're at it.Silver5urfer - Tuesday, November 17, 2020 - link
That is not happening. Apple is always thin and light. They don't even sell their HW for others as in a B2B situation for the Server Market or such, there's no DIY in Apple land, it's all propreitary and gated. AMD Is not going to sit idle and Intel as well, investor pressure, Market demands. AWS needs to put more of their HW in their services, Oracle started with Xeon and EPYC recently.Windows abandoning DX is never going to happen, they are pushing to far to make the DX12 the base for all Xbox games and DX11 is about to die sadly. And MS wants gaming market, with Xbox failure and constant dizziying of their own studios at garbage games (Gears5, Halo5, Infinite) they are betting on the XCloud like Luna and Stadia but the market will only decide how far that goes.
nico_mach - Tuesday, November 17, 2020 - link
The same MS that's putting everything in the cloud via subscriptions so that 'thin and light' devices can play AAA games? THAT MS?taligentia - Tuesday, November 17, 2020 - link
AWS doesn't care about AMD.They have their AWS Graviton (ARM) CPUs which destroys AMD/Intel. So much so they have been recently transitioning all of their managed services to it e.g. S3, RDS.
ARM is going to eat everything.
Silver5urfer - Tuesday, November 17, 2020 - link
uhh what. "Destroys AMD and Intel", is this a joke or what, go and read articles on STH first before writing such useless trash.."RDS instances are available in multiple configurations, starting with 2 vCPUs, with 8 GiB memory for M6g, and 16 GiB memory for R6g with up to 10 Gbps of network bandwidth, giving you new entry-level general purpose and memory optimized instances. The table below shows the list of instance sizes available for you:"
That is from Oct 2020 AWS blog, on RDS with Graviton 2, destroys ? utter bs, notice that line about "entry level".
ARM is not AWS nor Apple. Amazon is stupid to buy tons of machines based off EPYC and XEON machines ? Or what about PCIe based HPC accelerator markets with FP64 compute with MI RDNA2 and GA100. Step back to reality and see economies of scale and read about it before even writing such lines on AWS doesn't care, it's their business to provide the Enterprises on the requirments, ARM is not competiting in any case with x86, Marvell Thunder is dead, they abandoned X3 from Off Shelf to Custom design like Graviton 2 upon a client request. AMD bought Xilinx FPGA too for boosting their Server market and HPC, and then Altera has to show yet what is their case, Nuvia is all smoke show, Qualcomm abandoned. Huawei is banned and not even there with this N.A market of Datacenters, what on hell are you talking.
Hifihedgehog - Tuesday, November 17, 2020 - link
No worries. Developers are already in a strongly hostile posturing against Apple and Apple is going to try to pull a Microsoft and it is going to blow up miserably in their faces. The writing is on the wall that they are going to double down on the App Store in macOS. That is reason alone to look hard and long and use some objective common sense in light of history of what Apple has done, can do, does do, and will do to punish developers. Fool me once...taligentia - Tuesday, November 17, 2020 - link
You are delusional. Developers love the current situation.They can write ONE app and have it run on all Macs, iPads and iPhones.
nevcairiel - Wednesday, November 18, 2020 - link
I'm a developer for desktop software, and my target is Windows, Linux, and macOS, and macOS is the worst part of the job by far. And its not getting better.Developers entrenched in Apples ecosystem might like it, but someone like myself absolutely hates the direction all of this is going. macOS is already the worst desktop OS to develop a cross-platform app for.
Kuhar - Wednesday, November 18, 2020 - link
100% agree on that.