disregard. I confused microseconds with miliseconds 🙈
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Aspects where Intel Macs still outperform the M1 models?
- Thread starter jent
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Sorry for the typo, it was supposed to read "few". Yes, a microsecond is quite a long time, but one has to look at the things in relation to the broader context. If you core is in an extreme low-power state and requires 30-50μs to resume operation, a context switch suddenly becomes cheap. Also depends on how much work the thread needs to do. Context switches happen all the time.The kernel would usually run a thread for a couple of milliseconds (based on thread priority, system load etc.) before switching to another thread. Context switch costs become negligible here.
CPU performance is hard because it involves balancing events that differ in their duration by orders of magnitude. Accessing data from system RAM takes around 100ns for example — which is also an eternity for the CPU.
Yes, thanks for the elaboration, but I also confused microseconds with miliseconds. So I was off by a factor 1000 🙈
The RAM and storage ceilings as well as the monitor support and limited amount of USB-C/Thunderbolt ports will be remedied in future Apple Silicon Mac releases. M1 is the first of many Apple SoCs and it will always be the weakest of them all, by virtue of having been the first to market. They were foolish in releasing a Mac mini before these were remedied so as to tip their hand to M1's immediate short-comings in these regards (if it was just the MacBook Air and 2 port 13" MacBook Pro that made the jump, we wouldn't have come to the conclusion as quickly that these are M1 limitations rather than Apple looking to replace Intel models with like for like storage, RAM, and port options.
Don't forget x86-64 virtualization too. That's something Apple Silicon/ARM64 won't ever have. Otherwise, it's emulation and that's a whole 'nother story.
Why, it is the base model Mac Mini they have replaced. They still have Intel Mac Mini in the line-up with all the old ports and specs, so don't see how it is any different than the Macbook Pro 13" M1 introduction.
Apple's Mac Sales for 2021Q1 were double 2020Q1 so their financial results validated their release strategy.
The 2-port 13" MacBook Pro and the 4-port 13" MacBook Pro are two distinctly different Macs. They even have different model designations, names, and identifiers. The same is not true of the 2018 Mac mini. Even so, you could have taken a Core i3 model 2018 Mac mini, outfitted it with up to 64GB of RAM, used more than two displays on it (with more than one of them being allowed to use Thunderbolt 3 rather than strictly mandating that one be via HDMI and one be via Thunderbolt) AND have two additional Thunderbolt ports. This is not true of its M1 replacement.
The MacBook Air and 2-port 13" MacBook Pro are given upgrades that (lack of fan on the MacBook Air aside) at least match what their direct Intel predecessors have). I'd imagine that Apple didn't also upgrade the 4-port Intel MacBook Pro for the same reasons why I feel as though the M1 Mac mini was a premature Apple Silicon replacement to any 2018 Intel Mac mini model - namely, that it's not a 100% upgrade from its predecessor like the M1 MacBooks are from their respective direct predecessors.
I know I’m coming to this late, but I think this should be steered towards what people in the field who have had both have to say.
Just on your first bullet point, yes, this is a “limit” but it is at least for me a non-issue. I have my 13 inch MacBook Pro with ARM. I had a 16 inch MacBook Pro with Intel.
16GB seems like it may not be really much of a thing. With 16GB, and I can tell you I can do things with 16GB that would have made the 16 inch with 16GB of memory it’s performing better than the Intel 16 inch MacBook Pro. At one point, I was effectively using 20GB of memory with swapping, with 4GB free. The swapping to SSD wasn’t noticeable.
In practice, there isn’t anything, even with Rosetta that is “slightly faster” in day to day use. The M1 MacBook Pro effectively acts like an Intel machine with no thermal drop off. I can run a Microsoft Teams meeting for 90 minutes, and at the start, the puny Intel processor sounds like it’s trying to keep up. Performance drop off happens because of the heat so multitasking struggles, but it sounds like the laptop is trying to go airborne. On the M1 using Rosetta, it’s quiet the entire time, with no perceivable thermal drop off in performance.
Intels ads are poor marketing at best. It’s downright lies in day to day use. I’m not gentle on my machines. I never have been.
In practice, unless you need 4 ports, eGPU, or two physically connected displays there is no reason not to get the M1. It runs Intel better translated than Intel. It’s silent. Developers are actively translating their work, and they are bragging about how the M1 takes the Intel Core series to school, but waits for it to get out of detention, because the M1 was done for a while.
With this specific line of thought in mind, I fully expect the M1X will show up in the Mac Mini. When it does, I’ll probably get one loaded to the gills and abuse it wondering why it’s not screaming.
For all intent and purposses I would say the M1 is an upgrade for people choosing i3. Hardly anyone would buy the i3 with more than 16GB ram and though the Intel Mini can technically power 3 displays, the Intel UHD Graphics 630 is so underpowered, that you would want to cosider e-gpu for just running a pair of retina displays smoothly.
There are definitely workloads where the processor being an 8th Gen quad-core Core i3 doesn't matter because the loads are GPU/RAM/disk intensive (and where an eGPU is being used); I've seen i3 configurations with large amounts of RAM and SSD pop up on the Apple Certified Refurbished Mac section of the Apple Online Store before. I'm not saying that most people buying an i3 2018 Mac mini wouldn't be fine with an M1 Mac mini; just that there are still limitations on the M1 mini compared to its direct predecessor (much unlike the M1 MacBook Air and M1 2-port 13" MacBook Pro compared to their direct Intel-based predecessors).
I don't agree with that at all. Releasing the Mini gave them at least one Apple Silicon Desktop at launch and provided a drop in replacement for the DTK machine they shipped to developers in the summer. Apple wants as much Arm software as possible as soon as possible. The Mini gives developers low cost access to Apple Silicon and ia an excellent machine to run build agents. Mac Stadium is already offering hosted M1 Minis.
Right. Again, I'm not saying that the M1 mini isn't great. Just that it isn't a unilateral upgrade over its direct Intel predecessor product in the way that the M1 Air and M1 2-port 13" Pro are over their respective Intel predecessor products.
You are just being being a spec nazi now. Adding lots of ram and ssd would just make the cost of cpu-upgrade insignificant in the bigger picture. And anything 4core could, 6core can do better and they still sell you such a version. I would say i3 target configurations was within m1 limitations and though the i3 could easily have stayed in the line up, the overlap would just be too big and confusing.
Sometimes, they even drop a perfect product. I still bemoan the lack of 11" air successer and that 13" was the smallest M1 I could buy. Having them side by side and in hand, the difference in size and weight is bigger than the specs suggest and I just wished I could have the modern hardware ind the old 11"-12" designs. 😩
It's not just the RAM. It's the number of Thunderbolt ports, the lack of a 10GbE option, the fact that you have three ports that should be able to drive video and only two of them will (with one of them HAVING to be the HDMI port). I'm not being a specs nazi here. The M1 mini is not as much of an upgrade over the model it replaces as the M1 Air and M1 2-port 13" Pro are over the models they replace.
I'm not saying that the M1 mini sucks as a product. I'm saying that it sucks as a product that is supposed to be marketed as superior in every way to the product it is replacing. With every product in the Intel transition (save for maybe the element of the Intel graphics in those early MacBooks and Mac minis) and with every other product currently in the Apple Silicon transition, the newer product was a unilateral improvement over its predecessor. Certainly the M1 blows away the 8th Gen quad-core Core i3 (let alone the 8th Gen Hexa-core i5 and i7) and the Intel UHD 630. But port options, video out options, RAM options, all of that is a downgrade. If Apple hadn't touched the Mac mini in 2018 and maybe just issued specc bumped Haswell or even Broadwell refreshes (a la the 2017 MacBook Air), then I'd say that the M1 mini IS that unilateral upgrade. But the fact of the matter is that, from a marketing standpoint, the M1 mini is a mess in terms of replacing the 2018 model completely. At least with the 13" MacBook Pro, the 2-port and 4-port models are distinctly different Macs in the lineup with different model numbers, identifiers and everything.
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I doubt many people were driving three monitors from a base 2018 Mini with the Intel UHD 630. The integrated GPU of the Apple Silicon Mac is a major upgrade over the 2018 Minis.
The M1 version is an upgrade over the i3 for its intented position and audience as an entry level product. If you want higher end specs, which I would call specs above M1 limitations, you are no longer going for an entry level product and should go for i5 anyway. I strongly suppose Apples setup would have pushed you in that direction, with two standard configuration.
Btw. 10Gbps was considered as an option for M1 mac mini, why it didn't happen, only Apple knows, but I guess they either decided to save it for M1x and keep M1 purely entry level or late in the process faced the same problem they are facing with USB 3.1 gen 2 support, that a built-in hardware component has trouble actually delivering the promised 10Gbps. 🤷♂️
If you didn't need faster than a quad-core Core i3, but you needed 32GB of RAM and/or 10GbE and you wanted to run more than 2 displays, you could buy such a machine that fit that particular bill. You can't do that with an M1. Whether or not Apple believes that an entry level model doesn't have a target market audience that cares about such things is irrelevant to my point as is whether or not they are correct about such a belief if they, in fact, have it. My point is that, unlike any system in either the PowerPC to Intel transition nor the Intel to Apple Silicon transition (so far), you don't have any machine for which there is an obvious drawback from its direct predecessor on the soon-to-be-phased-out architecture. It goes against their own playbook, whether you feel it does so egregiously or not.
As I know you are a tech oriented person , i think we can have a technical discussion that wont go over your head like so many folks in this and other forums.
I present to you 2 systems , please tell me which has the better performance for most use cases :
1) 64GB memory + AMD Ryzen 5800x.
2) 32GB memory + AMD Ryzen 5800x.
Everything in the 2 computers are equal aside from the memory , i would also give you "same DRAM timings" on both memories.
I am not trolling , I promise!
Most people wouldn't notice the difference.
My task manager stats:
In use 31.7 GB
Committed 39.2/73.4 GB
Cached 31.0 GB
This is without my two main daily work programs running. It's nice to know that I could run five or six virtual machines at the same time if I wanted to, and I have done this in the past for testing.
It would depend solely on whether the systems were populating all four RAM slots or only 2.
If that is 4x16GB, it will outperform 2x16GB by about 7-10%, but that is solely down to quirks of the AMD infinity fabric.
If however it's 2x32GB, the difference would be entirely marginal at less than 2% difference.
The vast majority do email, web browsing, and watch movies. The 5800X alone would be overkill. Most systems today are sold with 4-16 GB of RAM which tells you about the kinds of workloads that the average person is using. I have a neighbor; his approach before he found my son was to toss out his PC and buy another one when it accumulated enough malware to make the system unusable. That's much less of a problem today but it gives you an idea as to the load levels that are typically placed on systems.
One factor prompting an upgrade is the addition of Zoom-type programs which do place a load on CPUs but a 5800X is still overkill.
I'm sorry, but what relevance does that have? He posed a question, I answered. You've just spouted fairly meaningless conjecture.