Apple M1 ARM Performance With A 2020 Mac Mini

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Apple M1 ARM Performance With A 2020 Mac Mini

For those curious about the hardware potential out of Apple's in-house M1 processor powering new Mac Book Pros and Mac Mini, for the past week we have been running benchmarks of this ARM-based processor and have a number of benchmarks to share today looking at how the performance compares to prior Intel-powered Macs along with the Rosetta 2.0 performance for running x86_64 binaries on ARMv8.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=29717

[GruenSein]

Looking forward to the comments already

[blacknova]

So, the main question is - Will it run Linux?
As nice as OSX UI is, I'm not sure I'm up to running OSX. Well, that, and the first generation is sorely lacking on RAM department and general extensibility.

[Jumbotron]

Pretty sad that a translation layer can outperform native x-86. But a testament to the team that engineered Rosetta. And of course the Apple Silicon team that has now raised the bar for the entire ARM world including server chip makers like Cavium and Nuvia.

Over at the The Register they have an article about how Crossover has a Apple Silicon M1 version of Crossover (Wine) running 32bit x86 Windows code on ARM through Rosetta. Apps mentioned that would run was Quicken and Team Fortress 2.

What's significant about this is unlike the x86 based Macs in the past you can't dual boot an Apple Silicon Mac and run Windows apps. So this Crossover capability is encouraging. Article linked below.

https://www.theregister.com/2020/11/19/crossover_apple_m1/

[Volta]

Mixed bag when comes to performance and terrible software. No, thanks.

[radeon]

Thanks for the interesting benchmark, Michael!
Any details on the power consumption and power efficiency?

[tildearrow]

That video encoding performance is so terrible, and just proves ARM still has some way to go... :<

So, the main question is - Will it run Linux?
As nice as OSX UI is, I'm not sure I'm up to running OSX. Well, that, and the first generation is sorely lacking on RAM department and general extensibility.

Doubtfully, if Apple locks down the machine.

[Jumbotron]

blacknova writes...

So, the main question is - Will it run Linux?
As nice as OSX UI is, I'm not sure I'm up to running OSX. Well, that, and the first generation is sorely lacking on RAM department and general extensibility.


Answer....who cares and what's the point? A lot of the M1's functionality would be useless to Linux. The Neural Processor, Matrix Math processor, the Visual Processor, the HSA like High Bandwidth Memory architecture, etc. Linux is COMPLETELY unoptimized even if you could hack a working unit. There would be no software optimized for it either. Could GIMP take advantage of the M1 capabilities above and beyond any x86 version? What about Openshot? Libreoffice? Ardour? The answer is clearly no.

The only thing you would learn about Linux on M1 is that you could even do it in the first place as a hacker's exercise and how fast native Linux binaries could run on just the plain cores in the M1 SoC. That wouldn't CERTAINLY not give the whole or the holistic picture of what could be achieved with Linux and Linux apps on M1.

[andrei_me]

Cool hardware, awful software above it 🙃

[jrch2k8]

So, the main question is - Will it run Linux?
As nice as OSX UI is, I'm not sure I'm up to running OSX. Well, that, and the first generation is sorely lacking on RAM department and general extensibility.

It won't run Linux for a long long time if at all since that SoC as the IPhone/IPad have a metric ton of custom proprietary accelerators that Apple won't simply release info about.

The best you could expect if anything is a headless mode running compute only on the ARM cores if someone can crack the boot process which i doubt given that even today no IPad can run Linux at all