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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Silver5urfer - Tuesday, November 17, 2020 - link
Why do you think that is going to happen, because Apple is making ARM chipset everyone in the world does it ? Microsoft already has Qualcomm 8cx Surface Pro X chip HW it's a garbage one since it has to translate 32bit x86 at slower rate and on top with ton of Windows exe ecosystem it will be even hard and then on top 64bit is not licensed, and if they do that it will be even more perf hit.Server market is not there, just forget it. Marvell abandoned Thunder X3 for off shelf CPUs, only Graviton 2 exists but it is limited scope and only for AWS. ARM is increasingly walled garden bs because look at the ARM Thunder X3, Marvell mentioned they will do a custom chip for any company who wants such machine but not off shelf, Graviton 2 is only for Amazon they don't sell it.
With more and more vertical nature of ARM why do you guys always want ARM to replace x86, do you like your software and hardware gated. Look at this Mac Apple Rosetta2 don't allow 32bit x86 it was dead. Last was Mojave, many users still use that. On top the HW is full BGA, no user can do anything on this. Even a repair would be near impossible due to too many blackboxes.
10-12years of dual core sadness lol, When there is no competition that is what happens, do you think Apple will do anything if there is no competition on mobile space ? AMD provided that now we have superb processors from AMD which are not only more powerful but rather more user friendly with DIY socket support, ECC RAM and etc.
YesYesNo - Tuesday, November 17, 2020 - link
Why would he want a fast efficient processor?Yeh i have no idea why someone would want that.
Silver5urfer - Tuesday, November 17, 2020 - link
This CPU is only for the light workloads not a replacement for i7 class machine. People think this is going to destroy 5950X and 10 series i9, by looking at the prev article comparisons with SPEC scores and GB on ST perf. When more cores come into play that advantage of Apple M1 diminishes. Which is why Apple is still having Intel macs for sale at a much higher price.YesYesNo - Tuesday, November 17, 2020 - link
I don't think it is a replacement for a decent desktop. Actually i don't know why i should care about low power in a desktop at all. But it is decent for a laptop if you want battery life without having to give up too much performance.SarahKerrigan - Tuesday, November 17, 2020 - link
It sure looks like a replacement for laptop i7's, which is the real comparison point here.YesYesNo - Tuesday, November 17, 2020 - link
I agree with this, it looks like it can replace a laptop i7, similar performance but better efficiency.melgross - Tuesday, November 17, 2020 - link
Ah, you just said it—ONLY when more cores are availav]Bluetooth Low Energy, and, by the way, three times as much power draw, does AMD show any consistent advantage.Do you really think Apple isn’t working on 6 and 8 core designs with even faster cores? Or even more powerful GPUs?
YesYesNo - Tuesday, November 17, 2020 - link
If you want to talk about hypothetical things Apple are working on you have to compare them to hypothetical things Intel and AMD are working on too.Silver5urfer - Tuesday, November 17, 2020 - link
Why don't we just talk on Zen 4, Nvidia Hopper and AMD RDNA3, TSMC made an announcement that 2nm risk prod is on track for 2023, that should be the discussion we should do right now. or how SpaceX is going to take us to Mars for instance while their mission Crew 1 is all in the news today.KoolAidMan1 - Tuesday, November 17, 2020 - link
Its already a replacement for i7 class machines in many productivity workloads, and this is just the entry level.If this can scrub 8k video in Resolve with no dropped frames then I can't wait to see what their beefy configurations are capable of.