Apple M1 ARM Performance With A 2020 Mac Mini

[microcode]

WTF is going on with zstd. If it's that fast is it even correct? Do they have special hardware to accelerate LZ-style compressors?

[milkylainen]

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.

Well. Yes. But you spend resources doing it. There is no magic in optimizing non-realtime stuff.
But this is as close as realtime as it gets, uses resources and sometimes gets away mere inches from native?
Are you telling me the native compiler is shittier than the x86->arm64 translation in terms of efficiency? Like massively so?

[JackLilhammers]

Maybe you, because Apple is still irrelevant on desktops.

They have ≈13% of the pc market share in the US and ≈7 in the world. I wouldn't call it irrelevant.
Especially I wouldn't do that when Linux sits comfortably at ≈1% and we think it's relevant enough to deserve games porting

[Jumbotron]

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



And most of them are running Linux, right?



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



Maybe you, because Apple is still irrelevant on desktops.

LOL....yes. 99.5% of the ARM based mobiles ARE running Linux. It's called.....ANDROID. And the rest are called....CHROMEOS.

LOL....of course. As ALL of the Top500 Supercomputers and the vast majority of Top1000.

LOL....Apple being "irrelevant" on desktop ? ROTFLMAO !!! EVERY R&D Department in the world from Microsoft to Google is using Apple as their R&D prototyping department. Here's how.

Step 1: Hey Bob....what's Apple doing today?

Step 2: Ok...thanks for the report Bob. Alright everyone....I want you all to copy what Apple is doing and have a working prototype ready to go in 6 months.

Pretty sad for Linux that after nearly 30 years, our desktop "relevancy" is still SEVERAL percentage points behind even Apple. And the ONLY "relevant" Linux desktop is either Android or ChromeOS.

[Volta]

They have ≈13% of the pc market share in the US and ≈7 in the world. I wouldn't call it irrelevant.
Especially I wouldn't do that when Linux sits comfortably at ≈1% and we think it's relevant enough to deserve games porting

7% isn't that much for company specializing in desktop computers. Linux was even over 3% not so long ago.

[milkylainen]

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.

You need to relax your "never, never, never" mantra dude.
That sounds like a true fanatic.
And don't worry. Even your beloved Apple relies on the shoulders of other men.

[name99]

"
Unfortunately also hitting a snag was the WattsUp Pro with macOS Big Sur seemingly breaking USB serial support and thus unable to provide our power monitoring on a per-test basis. I am currently working on alternatives to workaround those limitations but for this article today it means just looking at the raw performance.
"

It's not a great solution for scripting or automation, but you could look at installing iStat Menus (which now works with Apple Silicon) on the mini.

iStat Menus is one of those tools that puts info in the Apple menu bar. What gets displayed depends on the exact model, but on Intel macs it shows a variety of temperatures in different places of the machine, a variety of power/current levels again in different places in the machine, fan speed and so on. (Along with the usual stuff you expect like CPU usage, memory usage, disk throughput etc).

[Jumbotron]

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

Non of which....image magic nor python....are native to nor optimized for M1

[Volta]

LOL....yes. 99.5% of the ARM based mobiles ARE running Linux. It's called.....ANDROID. And the rest are called....CHROMEOS.

LOL....of course. As ALL of the Top500 Supercomputers and the vast majority of Top1000.

LOL....Apple being "irrelevant" on desktop ? ROTFLMAO !!! EVERY R&D Department in the world from Microsoft to Google is using Apple as their R&D prototyping department. Here's how.

Step 1: Hey Bob....what's Apple doing today?

Step 2: Ok...thanks for the report Bob. Alright everyone....I want you all to copy what Apple is doing and have a working prototype ready to go in 6 months.

Pretty sad for Linux that after nearly 30 years, our desktop "relevancy" is still SEVERAL percentage points behind even Apple. And the ONLY "relevant" Linux desktop is either Android or ChromeOS.

So, what were your points? Ok, doesn't matter. Linux is much younger on desktops than Apple. Wake me up when Apple becomes relevant, because Chrome OS is probably going to destroy it like Android did. Btw. comparing apple to apple isn't so meaningful in terms of performance. It's not a mystery macOS is slow mess.

[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.

The Apple M1 is the first ARM-based system on a chip (SoC) designed by Apple Inc. as a central processing unit (CPU) for its line of Macintosh computers.^[3] It is deployed in the MacBook Air (M1, 2020), Mac mini (M1, 2020), and the MacBook Pro (13-inch, M1, 2020).^[4] It is the first personal computer chip built using a 5 nm process. Apple states that it has the world's fastest CPU core "in low power silicon" and the world's best CPU performance per watt.^[3][5]
Architecture[edit]


The M1 has four high-performance "Firestorm" and four low-power "Icestorm" cores, providing a configuration similar to ARM big.LITTLE and Intel's Lakefield processors.^[6] This combination allows power-use optimizations not possible with Apple–Intel architecture devices. Apple claims the low-power cores use one tenth the power of the high-performance ones. The high-performance cores have 192 KB of instruction cache and 128 KB of data cache and share a 12 MB L2 cache; the low-power ones: 128 KB instruction cache, 64 KB data cache, and a shared 4 MB L2 cache. The Icestorm "E cluster" has a frequency of 0.6–2.064 GHz and a maximum power consumption of 1.3 W. The Firestorm "P cluster" has a frequency of 0.6–3.204 GHz and a maximum power consumption of 13.8 W.^[7]

Rosetta 2 dynamic binary translation technology enables M1-equipped products to run software built for Intel x86 CPUs.

The M1 uses 4266 MT/s LPDDR4X SDRAM^[8] in a unified memory configuration shared by all the components of the processor. The SoC and RAM chips are mounted together in a system-in-a-package design. 8 GB and 16 GB configurations are available.

The M1 integrates an Apple-designed eight-core (seven in some models) graphics processing unit (GPU) which by Apple's claim could execute nearly 25,000 threads simultaneously and dedicated neural network hardware in a 16-core Neural Engine, capable of executing 11 trillion operations per second. Other components include an image signal processor (ISP), NVMe storage and Thunderbolt 4 controllers and a Secure Enclave.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_M1