The 2020 Mac Mini Unleashed: Putting Apple Silicon M1 To The Test
by Andrei Frumusanu on November 17, 2020 9:00 AM ESTBenchmarks: Whatever Is Available
As we’ve had very little time with the Mac mini, and the fact that this not only is a macOS system, but a new Arm64-based macOS system, our usual benchmark choices that we tend to use aren’t really available to us. We’ve made due with a assortment of available tests at the time of the launch to give us a rough idea of the performance:
One particular benchmark that sees the first light of day on macOS as well as Apple Silicon is Cinebench. In this first-time view of the popular Cinema4D based benchmark, we see the Apple M1 toe-to-toe with the best-performing x86 CPUs on the market, vastly outperforming past Apple iterations of Intel silicon. The M1 here loses out to Zen3 and Tiger Lake CPUs, which still seem to have an advantage, although we’re not sure of the microarchitectural characteristics of the new benchmark.
What’s notable is the performance of the Rosetta2 run of the benchmark when in x86 mode, which is not only able to keep up with past Mac iterations but still also beat them.
In the multi-threaded R23 runs, the M1 absolutely dominates past Macs with similar low-power CPUs. Just as of note, we’re trying to gather more data on other systems as we have access to them, and expand the graph in further updates of the article past publishing.
In browser-benchmarks we’ve known Apple’s CPUs to very much dominate across the landscape, but there were doubts as to whether this was due to the CPUs themselves in the iPhone or rather just the browsers and browser engines. Now running on macOS and desktop Safari, being able to compare data to other Intel Mac systems, we can come to the conclusion that the performance advantage is due to Apple’s CPU designs.
Web-browsing performance seems to be an extremely high priority for Apple’s CPU, and this makes sense as it’s the killer workload for mobile SoCs and the workload that one uses the most in everyday life.
In Geekbench 5, the M1 does again extremely well as it actually takes the lead in our performance figures. Even when running in x86 compatibility mode, the M1 is able to match the top single-threaded performance of last generation’s high-end CPUs, and vastly exceed that of past iterations of the Mac mini and past Macbooks.
Multi-threaded performance is a matter of core-count and power efficiency of a design. The M1 here demolishes a 2017 15-inch Macbook Pro with an Intel i7-7820HQ with 4 cores and 8 threads, posting over double the score. We’ll be adding more data-points as we collect them.
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Ppietra - Tuesday, November 24, 2020 - link
No,with this:
https://twitter.com/i/web/status/13287773335122780...
anandtech author’s twitter account, something that for some reason you have refused to read!
amazing how you cannot distinguish between processor power consumption and machine power consumption.
Nicon0s - Monday, November 30, 2020 - link
"?? I gave you the Cinebench results. I gave the actual battery capacity, I gave how much it drained when running Cinebench and in what time interval - it is all in the videos!"LoL, you only linked to unprofessional, amateurish video. Nobody in their right mind would try to suggest that a video like that is conclusive in terms of how efficient a 4800U chip is.
Nicon0s - Monday, November 30, 2020 - link
"Didn’t measure the power draw? Really?Yeas, really. You have so clear perception problems.
Nicon0s - Monday, November 30, 2020 - link
Exactly, quite a flawed way of comparing processor efficiency, also he didn't even test the laptops until the end to see is the power is lost progressively on all laptops.Nicon0s - Monday, November 30, 2020 - link
"Sorry, but no!"WoW, some apple fanboys here are really dense.
Also recommending an amator youtuber, that was cringey.
Pacinamac - Saturday, November 21, 2020 - link
I am smiling know who had huge involvement in the development of M1...You all know who I am talking about...
Anand. :)
GeoffreyA - Sunday, November 22, 2020 - link
My brother and I were talking about the same thing a week or two ago. I reckon he's been giving Apple advice/guidance on this whole matter. Someone who can see the whole forest in one fell swoop, but understands the wood and bark as well. "The Enemy is moving with their armies of Zen, while the Coves of Sunny languish in the Lakes of Ice, under spell of the Willow Lady. The hero Rocket is detained in the Lost Fields of 14. Now, now is the time to strike with the M1, smiting down the Free Peoples of PC-earth, while the wind speaketh the language of ARM." ;)GeoffreyA - Sunday, November 22, 2020 - link
On a serious note, I think he's been giving the CPU team a bit of design advice too.Anyhow, it would be great to hear an update from him, even if it were just a personal one, telling us how he's doing.
Tomatotech - Sunday, November 29, 2020 - link
He can’t. A lot of contracts specify absolutely no talking to media (which would include Anandtech) without corporate approval. For someone coming from a journalist background, even running a personal blog might raise eyebrows as it is ‘public media’. I don’t like it, but many non-Apple companies are sensitive and paranoid about this kind of thing. I can only imagine it 100x worse at Apple.Tomatotech - Sunday, November 29, 2020 - link
To add, even if he got corporate approval for a screened interview / statement, it almost certainly couldn’t be with AnandTech. Apple / others might see that as unduly favouring one media outlet because he has personal history with AnandTech. The choice of outlet has to be done by someone else, choosing for professional reason, and fitting in with Apple’s media strategy.