The 2020 Mac Mini Unleashed: Putting Apple Silicon M1 To The Test
by Andrei Frumusanu on November 17, 2020 9:00 AM ESTSPEC2017 - Multi-Core Performance
While we knew that the Apple M1 would do extremely well in single-threaded performance, the design’s strengths are also in its power-efficiency which should directly translate to exceptionally good multi-threaded performance in power limited designs. We noted that although Apple doesn’t really publish any TDP figure, we estimate that the M1 here in the Mac mini behaves like a 20-24W TDP chip.
We’re including Intel’s newest Tiger Lake system with an i7-1185G7 at 28W, an AMD Ryzen 7 4800U at 15W, and a Ryzen 9 4900HS at 35W as comparison points. It’s to be noted that the actual power consumption of these devices should exceed that of their advertised TDPs, as it doesn’t account for DRAM or VRMs.
In SPECint2017 rate, the Apple M1 battles with AMD’s chipsets, with the results differing depending on the workload, sometimes winning, sometimes losing.
In the fp2017 rate results, we see similar results, with the Apple M1 battling it out with AMD’s higher-end laptop chip, able to beat the lower TDP part and clearly stay ahead of Intel’s design.
In the overall multi-core scores, the Apple M1 is extremely impressive. On integer workloads, it still seems that AMD’s more recent Renoir-based designs beat the M1 in performance, but only in the integer workloads and at a notably higher TDP and power consumption.
Apple’s lead against Intel’s Tiger Lake SoC at 28W here is indisputable, and shows the reason as to why Apple chose to abandon their long-term silicon partner of 15 years. The M1 not only beats the best Intel has to offer in this market-segment, but does so at less power.
I also included multi-threaded scores of the M1 when ignoring the 4 efficiency cores of the system. Here although it’s an “8-core” design, the heterogeneous nature of the CPUs means that performance is lop-sided towards the big cores. That doesn’t mean that the efficiency cores are absolutely weak: Using them still increases total throughput by 20-33%, depending on the workload, favouring compute-heavy tasks.
Overall, Apple doesn’t just deliver a viable silicon alternative to AMD and Intel, but actually something that’s well outperforms them both in absolute performance as well as power efficiency. Naturally, in higher power-level, higher-core count systems, the M1 can’t keep up to AMD and Intel designs, but that’s something Apple likely will want to address with subsequent designs in that category over the next 2 years.
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Zagor Te Nay - Sunday, November 22, 2020 - link
Unrelated to how good M1 is - and I think it is really darn good, and will only get better as devs start supporting it natively (although Rosetta 2 seems to be doing fine, all considered) - Intel is not hard to beat. AMD has done it with having much less money than Apple has.As someone said, Intel has stagnated themselves out of competition. They are more responsible for their own sad current situation than AMD or Apple, really.
Spunjji - Monday, November 23, 2020 - link
@Zagor Te Nay - I don't think the fact that AMD have finally clawed out a lead over Intel indicates that they're easy to beat.Nvidia had a crack at CPU design a while back and were forced to pack it in. Samsung have tried to out-engineer Apple with large ARM core designs and have failed. It's not clear whether Qualcomm can't compete or can't be *bothered* to compete, but they've never come within a year of Apple's designs and are usually around 18 months behind.
These are all large, wealthy, serious organisations. To be honest I'm impressed by Apple, and even more so by AMD.
beowulfey - Tuesday, November 17, 2020 - link
I mean, the point of benchmarks is to compare CPUs that are available today, right?In the hypothetical future where Zen 4 is comparable to an M1, I would counter that by then the latest Apple M3 or whatever will have improved as well, so...
Tams80 - Tuesday, November 17, 2020 - link
But Zen 2 is roughly comparable to the M1.No one is claiming that other future processors will only match the M1. Well, perhaps other than you in your imagination.
halo37253 - Tuesday, November 17, 2020 - link
M1 is slower than 4800u when it comes to multithread workloads. Even on these video compression tests.... While using slightly more power at most. 22watts vs 25watts while running cinebench...Zen3 mobile will be out before M2, and will most likely have no problems matching or beating M2 in nearly any task while using same amount of power. While being 7nm
Only reason why M1 is even remotely impressive is largely thanks to 5nm. Apple managed to compete with Zen 2 in terms of power efficiency with 5nm, even though Zen 2 is 7nm. This M1 chip is no more impressive than the 4800u in terms of Performance/watt. M1 just has higher single thread vs weaker multi thread....
Spunjji - Tuesday, November 17, 2020 - link
@halo36253 - have to disagree with you on that part. A 5nm process does not magically make a 3.2Ghz CPU act like one boosting north of 4Ghz. M1 is particularly impressive for power draw, which has a lot to do with that process, but it's also quite fast in its own right. Beating out Intel and duelling with a newly-resurgent AMD is an impressive showing for their first SoC designed for anything more than an iPad.It's also impressive that it is even on 5nm in the first place. It would have taken lots of work between designers and the foundry to pull that off a year before AMD will make the move.
halo37253 - Tuesday, November 17, 2020 - link
I probably was a little too critical.Yes the M1 deserves all the praise it can get. But some of that praise should be on TSMC, they are on fire. TSMC and Samsung have leapfrogged Intel. And Honestly if Intel's Fabs were able to keep up, this move to Arm would have been more questionable. I too think it made more sense to go with their own chip than risk the mac lineup with AMD processors.
I just wonder how well they can scale their Arm chips of, if they ever do. As if they ever really want to transition the Macbook pro 16, iMac or Macpro We need a Ryzen competitor. Intel was already behind in there areas and users have been wanting a high core count Mac for a long time now. Sadly the idea of running VMs on a Mac is looking grim.
Apple's Silicon is just what I figured it would be when it was allowed to actually suck power and stay cool. While the 22-25watt wall is most likely firmware enforced to keep the chip from pulling more power than designed for. GPU and CPU performance is top notch. This is what Arm should be. Now only if Apple and MS would work together to get windows for ARM working in bootcamp.
I just hope we one day see a 8-16 core M series chip from apple only packing high power cores. I'd love to see a ARM chip with a TDP of 65-95watts that doesn't consist of 100 cores.
Many people have been under the spell that Apple's silicon is somehow magically leagues above everyone else. They are no doubt good, and do give AMD a run for their Money. Funny to say that both AMD and Apple are making Intel look bad.
I've been wanting a ARM laptop for a long time now TBH. And been putting off getting the Wife a Macbook till these new ARM chips hit the market. Now I just need to hope MS works with Apple on getting Windows onto this. As as soon as windows for ARM allows for x64 apps to run, windows would be the choice for getting games running on these devices.
chris.parker@flipingreat.com - Tuesday, November 17, 2020 - link
Why Windows... ??? All apps can run Arm, windows is not something you run, its a desktop, that I personally practically never use. Applications, now that's what I use. MS has announced a native Arm M1 version of Office, and I am in 100%tuxRoller - Tuesday, November 17, 2020 - link
Oh yeah, this is far less critical🙄Eric S - Tuesday, November 17, 2020 - link
TSMC has been doing very well. Although remember that a lot of their work is financed by a cash infusion from Apple.