M1 clock speed in Mac Studio vs Mac Mini

[Peter_M]

Hi,

Curious about the Mac Studio, and how it differs to the Mac Mini (besides added cores and memory). Is the single core performance similar, or does the Mac Studio's M1 run at a higher clock speed? I only need a powerful CPU with emphasis on single core performance (composing, DAW), and don't need the additional GPU cores. However, the Mac Mini is still powerful, although I miss having a larger SSD and at least 64gb of RAM.

Anyone read anything about the core clocks, or seen any comparative benchmarks?

Thanks!

 

[Mailia]

The single-core Geekbench score is basically identical between the M1 and the M1 Ultra. If there is any difference between single-core workloads, it probably comes from the RAM, as the M1 and M1 Pro/Max/Ultra have different memory.

 

[Peter_M]

Thanks! Mac Studio seems like a great machine for those that have the money (as soon as you start to add storage and RAM it gets real expensive), I'll probably hang on to my Mac Mini i7 until M3.

 

[throAU]

Be very very careful about what benchmarks you're comparing.

The clocks are similar, processing intensive performance per core is similar and geekbench may be similar, but the memory bandwidth difference between M1 and M1 Ultra is about 9-10x. Like 70 gig/sec vs. 800 gig/sec.

If your workload is bandwidth intensive, it will be massively different.

 

[Mailia]

You will not be getting 800 GB/s on the CPU-side on the M1 Ultra unless they've done something drastically different from the M1 Pro/Max.

Adding a third thread there’s a bit of an imbalance across the clusters, DRAM bandwidth goes to 204GB/s, but a fourth thread lands us at 224GB/s and this appears to be the limit on the SoC fabric that the CPUs are able to achieve, as adding additional cores and threads beyond this point does not increase the bandwidth to DRAM at all. It’s only when the E-cores, which are in their own cluster, are added in, when the bandwidth is able to jump up again, to a maximum of 243GB/s.


While 243GB/s is massive, and overshadows any other design in the industry, it’s still quite far from the 409GB/s the chip is capable of. More importantly for the M1 Max, it’s only slightly higher than the 204GB/s limit of the M1 Pro, so from a CPU-only workload perspective, it doesn’t appear to make sense to get the Max if one is focused just on CPU bandwidth.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performance-review/2

 

[Peter_M]

You will not be getting 800 GB/s on the CPU-side on the M1 Ultra unless they've done something drastically different from the M1 Pro/Max.


https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performance-review/2

Thanks, that's very useful information. I use Logic Pro with large sample libraries, and the bottlenecks here are mainly SSD speed and software code (Kontakt in particular), which would probably nullify those those high-end memory bandwidth gains. It'll be great for other pro work usages for sure.

 

[Wando64]

Logic Pro with large sample libraries,

You already know this, but you'll need loads of RAM for sampled libraries and you are not going to get it from the M1 mini.
That said, loads of people are doing very intensive Logic work with it and they seem very happy, but if you are doing orchestral work with sampled libraries I'd be wary.

 

[DearthnVader]

Thanks, that's very useful information. I use Logic Pro with large sample libraries, and the bottlenecks here are mainly SSD speed and software code (Kontakt in particular), which would probably nullify those those high-end memory bandwidth gains. It'll be great for other pro work usages for sure.

You say you use Logic Pro, but your workflow won't benefit from multi-cores/threading?

Logic Pro is threaded, you should have no issue befitting from multi-core.

 

[Peter_M]

You say you use Logic Pro, but your workflow won't benefit from multi-cores/threading?

Logic Pro is threaded, you should have no issue befitting from multi-core.

True, but the Mac Mini is already very powerful, however better single thread performance would help with buffer size and latency. Either way, I'm keeping my Mac Mini i7 at least another year or two. I was just curious about the difference in clock speed. Thanks for the replies.

 

[F-Train]

I plan to purchase a Mac Studio/M1 Max that I'll use with Logic and sample libraries such as Spitfire's BBC Orchestra, and the main question that I'm mulling is 32GB or 64GB of Unified Memory.

 

[Peter_M]

I plan to purchase a Mac Studio/M1 Max that I'll use with Logic and sample libraries such as Spitfire's BBC Orchestra, and the main question that I'm mulling is 32GB or 64GB of Unified Memory.

It depends on the size of your templates, but I would definitely get 64gb of RAM considering the investment here, since there is no way to upgrade later. You could always look at how much memory your machine uses now, with your largest projects, and take it from there.

 

[F-Train]

It depends on the size of your templates, but I would definitely get 64gb of RAM considering the investment here, since there is no way to upgrade later. You could always look at how much memory your machine uses now, with your largest projects, and take it from there.

I'm currently using a 2018 Mac mini (i7, 32GB RAM) with an external graphics card. I'm in the 32GB RAM works OK, 64GB would be nice category