Apple M4 Mac Mini With macOS vs. Intel / AMD With Ubuntu Linux Performance

[sophisticles]

The reality is that these benchmarks do not show the real power of these systems.

The M powered Macs are designed for the creative professionals, they are the only systems that feature hardware accelerated ProRes and ProRes RAW encode and decode, though currently only through FCP.

But for $600 base price, if you need to work with ProRes/RAW, this things can't be beat.

You also have hardware encode and decode of AVC and HEVC, through numerous apps like Handbrake and ffmpeg and you have hardware ray tracing.

This is why I can't see anyone buying one of these to install Linux, or any other OS for that matter, on these.

You lose way to much for what you gain.

[milkylainen]

Should be more interesting once Linux support arrives.
It is difficult to compare this, almost laptop style tune, to a full machine.
For a lot of reasons, not just power consumption.

[unwind-protect]

Power consumption charts LOL

Not bad speed for a computer that costs what just the other CPUs cost.

What's so special about how the Flac encoder does its business?

[unwind-protect]

I understand the logic of this. However, I'm primarily interested in how the CPUs compare and that really demands that you use the same version of the same toolchain on both platforms and set one of them to cross-compile, so they're both targeting the same ISA and ABI!

I would be interested to see results of the compilation tests in a virtual machine on the Mac.

[Forge]

Looks like Apple is power limiting the M4, which is useful for a battery powered device like a laptop, but the Mac Mini is a desktop computer and it can benefit from extra performance.

Yes and no. Apple isn't hard-constraining performance, as in "if you let it have 100W it would increase performance a lot". It *is* constraining performance in that the M chips are targeted for the 0-40W envelope. I can tell you from past tinkering that if you unconstrain the M1 and M2 chips, they get *hotter* very fast, and get *faster* very slowly. Apple has them sitting at a good spot for thermals versus performance, and it's precisely where the design is meant to be.

tl;dr - You will never see a 200W M5 Ultra Max Pro Premium, because it wouldn't actually perform much better. M series is meant to go wide, not tall, and do it quietly and efficiently. It's a laptop/mini chip first and foremost.

[coder]

The efficiency is pretty impressive! This is the basic M4 silicon and its performance is really not bad!

In a few cases where we can clearly see P-core vs. P-core and vector optimizations don't potentially favor one side, the Apple CPU looks quite strong:

[gnattu]

What's so special about how the Flac encoder does its business?

Flac is mostly single threaded so Apple's single core performance edge kicks in, which is marketed as "world's fastest cpu core"

[pWe00Iri3e7Z9lHOX2Qx]

Important to keep in mind that this is the relatively weak sauce regular M4 that only has 4 performance cores and 6 efficiency cores. The M4 pro takes a big step up to 8 or 10 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores depending on the SKU. I'm glad they at least have a usable baseline memory floor now of 16GB (thanks to Apple Intelligence requirements, not benevolence). But the SSD upgrade pricing is still bananas. And unlike the non-upgradeable RAM which you can at least explain away with the memory bandwidth they offer, there isn't really a good reason for the proprietary SSD other than to reap crazy profits on the storage.

[coder]

tl;dr - You will never see a 200W M5 Ultra Max Pro Premium, because it wouldn't actually perform much better. M series is meant to go wide, not tall, and do it quietly and efficiently. It's a laptop/mini chip first and foremost.

According to Apple, the M2 Ultra-powered Mac Studio can use up to 295 W.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/102027

The only things in the case are the SoC, SSD, Ethernet phy, and a fan. So, that's pretty much all SoC. Even if we take it to be their "at the wall" figure and assume a power supply efficiency of 87%, that means the SoC is still using up to ~250 W.

[pWe00Iri3e7Z9lHOX2Qx]

While not cheap, the $2400 USD SKU MacBook Pro with the 14 core (10P/4E) CPU / 20 core GPU M4 Pro with 24GB RAM, 1 TB SSD, and 3 Thunderbolt 5 ports would be a beast of a laptop with great battery life. The warranty will be out on my M1 Pro work laptop in a few months, and as much as I dislike macOS, it's going to be hard not to refresh to an M4 Pro machine. I'll have to see what the x86 laptop options are at the time.