The 2020 Mac Mini Unleashed: Putting Apple Silicon M1 To The Test
by Andrei Frumusanu on November 17, 2020 9:00 AM ESTSPEC2017 - Multi-Core Performance
While we knew that the Apple M1 would do extremely well in single-threaded performance, the design’s strengths are also in its power-efficiency which should directly translate to exceptionally good multi-threaded performance in power limited designs. We noted that although Apple doesn’t really publish any TDP figure, we estimate that the M1 here in the Mac mini behaves like a 20-24W TDP chip.
We’re including Intel’s newest Tiger Lake system with an i7-1185G7 at 28W, an AMD Ryzen 7 4800U at 15W, and a Ryzen 9 4900HS at 35W as comparison points. It’s to be noted that the actual power consumption of these devices should exceed that of their advertised TDPs, as it doesn’t account for DRAM or VRMs.
In SPECint2017 rate, the Apple M1 battles with AMD’s chipsets, with the results differing depending on the workload, sometimes winning, sometimes losing.
In the fp2017 rate results, we see similar results, with the Apple M1 battling it out with AMD’s higher-end laptop chip, able to beat the lower TDP part and clearly stay ahead of Intel’s design.
In the overall multi-core scores, the Apple M1 is extremely impressive. On integer workloads, it still seems that AMD’s more recent Renoir-based designs beat the M1 in performance, but only in the integer workloads and at a notably higher TDP and power consumption.
Apple’s lead against Intel’s Tiger Lake SoC at 28W here is indisputable, and shows the reason as to why Apple chose to abandon their long-term silicon partner of 15 years. The M1 not only beats the best Intel has to offer in this market-segment, but does so at less power.
I also included multi-threaded scores of the M1 when ignoring the 4 efficiency cores of the system. Here although it’s an “8-core” design, the heterogeneous nature of the CPUs means that performance is lop-sided towards the big cores. That doesn’t mean that the efficiency cores are absolutely weak: Using them still increases total throughput by 20-33%, depending on the workload, favouring compute-heavy tasks.
Overall, Apple doesn’t just deliver a viable silicon alternative to AMD and Intel, but actually something that’s well outperforms them both in absolute performance as well as power efficiency. Naturally, in higher power-level, higher-core count systems, the M1 can’t keep up to AMD and Intel designs, but that’s something Apple likely will want to address with subsequent designs in that category over the next 2 years.
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Holliday75 - Tuesday, November 17, 2020 - link
I pray to the computer gaming gods that I do not have to purchase an Apple product 10 years from now.nandnandnand - Tuesday, November 17, 2020 - link
You might need to make a sacrifice while you're at it.Silver5urfer - Tuesday, November 17, 2020 - link
That is not happening. Apple is always thin and light. They don't even sell their HW for others as in a B2B situation for the Server Market or such, there's no DIY in Apple land, it's all propreitary and gated. AMD Is not going to sit idle and Intel as well, investor pressure, Market demands. AWS needs to put more of their HW in their services, Oracle started with Xeon and EPYC recently.Windows abandoning DX is never going to happen, they are pushing to far to make the DX12 the base for all Xbox games and DX11 is about to die sadly. And MS wants gaming market, with Xbox failure and constant dizziying of their own studios at garbage games (Gears5, Halo5, Infinite) they are betting on the XCloud like Luna and Stadia but the market will only decide how far that goes.
nico_mach - Tuesday, November 17, 2020 - link
The same MS that's putting everything in the cloud via subscriptions so that 'thin and light' devices can play AAA games? THAT MS?taligentia - Tuesday, November 17, 2020 - link
AWS doesn't care about AMD.They have their AWS Graviton (ARM) CPUs which destroys AMD/Intel. So much so they have been recently transitioning all of their managed services to it e.g. S3, RDS.
ARM is going to eat everything.
Silver5urfer - Tuesday, November 17, 2020 - link
uhh what. "Destroys AMD and Intel", is this a joke or what, go and read articles on STH first before writing such useless trash.."RDS instances are available in multiple configurations, starting with 2 vCPUs, with 8 GiB memory for M6g, and 16 GiB memory for R6g with up to 10 Gbps of network bandwidth, giving you new entry-level general purpose and memory optimized instances. The table below shows the list of instance sizes available for you:"
That is from Oct 2020 AWS blog, on RDS with Graviton 2, destroys ? utter bs, notice that line about "entry level".
ARM is not AWS nor Apple. Amazon is stupid to buy tons of machines based off EPYC and XEON machines ? Or what about PCIe based HPC accelerator markets with FP64 compute with MI RDNA2 and GA100. Step back to reality and see economies of scale and read about it before even writing such lines on AWS doesn't care, it's their business to provide the Enterprises on the requirments, ARM is not competiting in any case with x86, Marvell Thunder is dead, they abandoned X3 from Off Shelf to Custom design like Graviton 2 upon a client request. AMD bought Xilinx FPGA too for boosting their Server market and HPC, and then Altera has to show yet what is their case, Nuvia is all smoke show, Qualcomm abandoned. Huawei is banned and not even there with this N.A market of Datacenters, what on hell are you talking.
Hifihedgehog - Tuesday, November 17, 2020 - link
No worries. Developers are already in a strongly hostile posturing against Apple and Apple is going to try to pull a Microsoft and it is going to blow up miserably in their faces. The writing is on the wall that they are going to double down on the App Store in macOS. That is reason alone to look hard and long and use some objective common sense in light of history of what Apple has done, can do, does do, and will do to punish developers. Fool me once...taligentia - Tuesday, November 17, 2020 - link
You are delusional. Developers love the current situation.They can write ONE app and have it run on all Macs, iPads and iPhones.
nevcairiel - Wednesday, November 18, 2020 - link
I'm a developer for desktop software, and my target is Windows, Linux, and macOS, and macOS is the worst part of the job by far. And its not getting better.Developers entrenched in Apples ecosystem might like it, but someone like myself absolutely hates the direction all of this is going. macOS is already the worst desktop OS to develop a cross-platform app for.
Kuhar - Wednesday, November 18, 2020 - link
100% agree on that.