Apple M1 ARM Performance With A 2020 Mac Mini

[milkylainen]

I find it fascinating that Rosetta can be that fast.
This is instruction translation. And even so it's more than half the speed of native.

Either all x86 compilers are absolute rubbish, all or Rosetta is some alien magic sauce.

Other than that I'd want some more hard data compared to competing technology.
Transistors, caches, frequency, process technology, power budget.

[spykes]

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.

It has to start somewhere, if you can't run Linux on it you won't have optimized Linux app for it. On the other side if it would be possible to boot Linux on the machine, then it could make sense to look into specific optimisations for it.

[blacknova]

I find it fascinating that Rosetta can be that fast.
This is instruction translation. And even so it's more than half the speed of native.

Either all x86 compilers are absolute rubbish, all or Rosetta is some alien magic sauce.

Other than that I'd want some more hard data compared to competing technology.
Transistors, caches, frequency, process technology, power budget.

Or Rosetta is better in static translating x86->RISC than AMD's and Intel's CPUs built-in translator (since both provide x86 interface to their internal RISC cores).
That actually is easier to believe as Rosetta is not restricted to real-time translation.

[hyperchaotic]

Considering most of the benchmarks were run through rosetta, the results are stunningly good. If all benchmarks were run with native arm code, it would be turning a few more heads no doubt.

Yes, early tests show native is often around 20-25% faster than Rosetta. It's a spectacular chip for sure and very advanced with a 8-wide design for one thing. As if that isn't enough the SSD can do 2190 MB/s writes and 2675 MB/s reads, all in all that makes the ultra light laptops (and the Mini) really really responsive.

[Jumbotron]

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

Looks like somebody had too many cups of "Joe Bitch" coffee.

Uhhh...you do know that this is x86 binaries running in a translation similar in vein to Wine...right? And the M1 STILL came in second in WebP encoding. Right?

And on FLAC it only ran bad on native ARM because, as Michael pointed out, FLAC has NO ARM optimizations to speak of.

Which is why i have been saying ever since Apple revealed months ago they were going to release ARM only Macs from here on out...and even BEFORE Apple revealed this and it was just rumor for years, that the FLOSS world and Linux had better get their asses in gear and port EVERYTHING over to ARM like yesterday. Every FLOSS project should have a dual track of x86 AND ARM development.

The Age of ARM is here.

By the end of the decade, 2029 + 1, the majority of laptops and desktops will be ARM based. How do I calculate that? Simple. Every Apple laptop and desktop by the end of 2021 will be ARM based. More than half of EVERY Chromebook and Chrome desktop will be ARM based by 2030. And at least a quarter if not half of EVERY Windows based laptop and desktop will be ARM based.

Of course, that's not to include every mobile device in the world, which is 99.5% ARM.

And not to mention that the world's fastest in Raw Compute AND the world's most power efficient Supercomputer is ARM based.

Tick Tock desktop Linux. We are becoming increasingly marginalized and irrelevant.

[Jumbotron]

I have never been a fan of Apple any thing. But I was watching a bunch of videos of people using the cheapest version of these with Davinci Resolve yesterday and my jaw hit the floor. These work better for that use case than the the Mac Pro. I have recently bought a new motherboard $500, CPU $500, RAM $200, and now I am looking at adding a graphics card. $900. Prices CDN. This thing will keep up with that hardware for most tasks and will beat it like a cheap rug in a number of others. The bonus is I wouldn't have waste any more time pulling my hair out over the tragic openCL support on Linux.

The bottom line is I have work I need to get done that is stuck currently because I can't edit 6K RAW footage in real time. If I am able to get a RX-6800 XT when the partner boards launch on Wednesday I will. If it is another vapourware launch for reviewers only then I will skip upgrading my graphics card this cycle and put the money towards one of these. It could be a single use device for DR only but if Apple can deliver and Linux can't I have no choice. Flame away.

No flame here. You speak truth.

[Volta]

Looks like somebody had too many cups of "Joe Bitch" coffee.

Uhhh...you do know that this is x86 binaries running in a translation similar in vein to Wine...right? And the M1 STILL came in second in WebP encoding. Right?

Currently there's no enough details about this. I'd love to see high end CPUs comparison.

Of course, that's not to include every mobile device in the world, which is 99.5% ARM.

And most of them are running Linux, right?

And not to mention that the world's fastest in Raw Compute AND the world's most power efficient Supercomputer is ARM based.

Yeah and it's running Linux, isn't it?

Tick Tock desktop Linux. We are becoming increasingly marginalized and irrelevant.

Maybe you, because Apple is still irrelevant on desktops.

[Vistaus]

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.

I'm not sure OS X is even supported by M1

In all seriousness: you mean macOS, as it's called these days (OS X is the old name that has been dropped quite some time ago).

[Jumbotron]

I find it fascinating that Rosetta can be that fast.
This is instruction translation. And even so it's more than half the speed of native.

Either all x86 compilers are absolute rubbish, all or Rosetta is some alien magic sauce.

Other than that I'd want some more hard data compared to competing technology.
Transistors, caches, frequency, process technology, power budget.

You are correct. It is Alien Magic Sauce.

Here's the recipe. All hardware departments and software departments are housed in the same building. Apple, 1 Infinite Loop, Silicon Valley.

This is the power of coordination, not fragmentation. You will never...never...never....not in a million years ever....get this kind of extreme performance at such a modest power budget from the Windows world, the Google/ChromeOS/Android/Java/Kotlin/Flutter/Python world, and especially the Linux world.

Do this as an exercise.

1: Go to YouTube
2: Find the infamous video of Microsoft's ex CEO Steve Ballmer doing the "Developers, Developers, Developers" chant all the while shooting flop sweat from every pore.
3: Now....either through cunning editing techniques or simply doing it in your mind, replace the word "Developers" with...."Fragmentation"

That's why Apple has now and will forever more have the most optimized, powerful, and powerfully efficient software and hardware. The best the Windows, Google and Linux world can hope for and DEVELOP for is for ARM with it's native ecosystem of in die compute models such as in die DSP's, in die Neural Net Processors, in die Visual Processors, in die Advanced Matrix Math Processors, in die Storage Processors, in die FPGA's, etc. NOT ONE x86 CPU has ANY of these. NOT....ONE. Well...you could include the Trusted Zone ARM cores in AMD CPU's....but...really....is that helping your encoding ??

I'll make it easy. Below is the video to Steve Ballmer's Flop Sweat Rave on Developers. Once again....substitute that word with "Fragmentation"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMU0tzLwhbE

[Grinness]

The performance are good, but the 'straw-man' is honestly wrong (aka the M1 is compared to old CPUs in strongly thermally constrained machines)

Old mac (books, but not only) are not particularly fast as Apple tends to prefer thermals to raw power due to their thin design
I had a number of mac books (intel) and always found them slow compared to the same CPUs in non-apple windows/linux machines.

If you compare the performance in the article with the openbenchmarks numbers that considers more modern CPUS (e.g. Ryzen 4500U), in non-apple products:

https://openbenchmarking.org/result/2011202-PTS-MERGE68890&sor

in a number of scenarios the M1 gets destroyed (e.g. Image magic, Python, etc) -- reversing what shown in the article on the same test bench.

the clear advantage of the M1 is the RAM in the same package of the CPU etc, reducing latencies but at the expense of upgradability, maintenance, fix, etc.
-- It would be interesting to see the comparisons with (i.e.) a PS4 running linux just to understand what an optimised and fixed design brings on the table.

Personally there are more interesting offers with similar form factor to the Mac Mini, that provide better performance: the ASUS PN50 (Ryzen 4500U)
And may cost less