However, Apple has also removed the ability to upgrade the RAM in the Mac Mini, capping it at 16GB.Benchmark results for the Mac mini (Late 2018) with an Intel Core. At least, in the short run. It even knocked 100 off the previous Mac Mini’s price, making it the cheapest way to try out the new M1 processor. T his week, Apple updated its Mac Mini line, featuring the company’s new in-house silicon.I use a Late 2014 base Mac mini as a Plex server and it can barely keep up with that. No matter what you buy it will be better. If anything just sell it and buy whatever you can afford with your proceeds. Mac mini (Late 2014).Last week, Apple made industry news by announcing new Mac products based upon the company’s new Apple Silicon M1 SoC chip, marking the first move of a planned 2-year roadmap to transition over from Intel-based x86 CPUs to the company’s own in-house designed microprocessors running on the Arm instruction set.Dont try to game on an old Mac mini, youre just gonna have a bad time.Apple had presented several charts including performance and power axes, however we lacked comparison data as to come to any proper conclusion.As we had access to the Mac mini rather than a Macbook, it meant that power measurement was rather simple on the device as we can just hook up a meter to the AC input of the device. Both the 4 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores can be active in tandem, meaning that this is an 8-core SoC, although performance throughput across all the cores isn’t identical.The biggest question during the announcement event was the power consumption of these designs. As long as there's thermal headroom, this clock also applies to all-core loads, with in addition to 4x 3.2GHz performance cores also seeing 4x Thunder efficiency cores at 2064MHz, also quite a lot higher than 1823MHz on the A14.Alongside the four performance Firestorm cores, the M1 also includes four Icestorm cores which are aimed for low idle power and increased power efficiency for battery-powered operation. Apple Silicon M1: Firestorm cores at 3.2GHz & ~20-24W TDP?During the launch event, one thing that was in Apple fashion typically missing from the presentation were actual details on the clock frequencies of the design, as well as its TDP which it can sustain at maximum performance.We can confirm that in single-threaded workloads, Apple’s Firestorm cores now clock in at 3.2GHz, a 6.66% increase over the 3GHz frequency of the Apple A14.
2014 Mini For Gaming Upgrade The RAMAlready with these figures the new M1 is might impressive and showcases less than a third of the power of a high-end Intel mobile CPU.In multi-threaded scenarios, power highly depends on the workload. The active power figure is very much in line with what we would expect from a higher-clocked Firestorm core, and is extremely promising for Apple and the M1.In workloads which are more DRAM heavy and thus incur a larger power penalty on the LPDDR4X-class 128-bit 16GB of DRAM on the Mac mini, we’re seeing active power go up to 10.5W. Given that we’re measuring AC power into the device which can be quite inefficient at low loads, this makes quite a lot of sense and represents an excellent figure.This idle figure also serves as a baseline for following measurements where we calculate “active power”, meaning our usual methodology of taking total power measured and subtracting the idle power.During average single-threaded workloads on the 3.2GHz Firestorm cores, such as GCC code compilation, we’re seeing device power go up to 10.5W with active power at around 6.3W. Across 8x 16-bit memory channels and at LPDDR4X-4266-class memory, this means the M1 hits a peak of 68.25GB/s memory bandwidth.In terms of memory latency, we’re seeing a (rather expected) reduction compared to the A14, measuring 96ns at 128MB full random test depth, compared to 102ns on the A14.Of further note is the 12MB L2 cache of the performance cores, although here it seems that Apple continues to do some partitioning as to how much as single core can use as we’re still seeing some latency uptick after 8MB.The M1 also contains a large SLC cache which should be accessible by all IP blocks on the chip. Memory DifferencesBesides the additional cores on the part of the CPUs and GPU, one main performance factor of the M1 that differs from the A14 is the fact that’s it’s running on a 128-bit memory bus rather than the mobile 64-bit bus. This would contain a larger amount of DRAM power, so the power consumption of Apple’s GPU is definitely extremely low-power, and far less than the peak power that the CPUs can draw. These figures are generally what you’d like to compare to “TDPs” of other platforms, although again to get an apples-to-apples comparison you’d need to further subtract some of the overhead as measured on the Mac mini here – my best guess would be a 20 to 24W range.Finally, on the part of the GPU, we’re seeing a lower power consumption figure of 17.3W in GFXBench Aztec High. Best 2017 mac for college college confidentialNevertheless, this 59GB/s peak bandwidth of one core is essentially also the speed at which memory copies happen, no matter the amount of active cores in the system, again, a great feat for Apple.Beyond the clock speed increase, L2 increase, this memory boost is also very likely to help the M1 differentiate its performance beyond that of the A14, and offer up though competition against the x86 incumbents. The fact that a single Firestorm core can almost saturate the memory controllers is astounding and something we’ve never seen in a design before.Because one core is able to make use of almost the whole memory bandwidth, having multiple cores access things at the same time don’t actually increase the system bandwidth, but actually due to congestion lower the effective achieved aggregate bandwidth. Most importantly, memory copies land in at 60 to 62GB/s depending if you’re using scalar or vector instructions. Inside of the M1, the results are ground-breaking: A single Firestorm achieves memory reads up to around 58GB/s, with memory writes coming in at 33-36GB/s. : SPEC2017 - Multi-Core Performance : SPEC2006 & 2017: Industry Standard - ST Performance : M1 GPU Performance: Integrated King, Discrete Rival : Benchmarks: Whatever Is Available andreif7: It's going to be a complete utter shit show, we'll either have massive functionality regressions or… IanCutress: Heh just wrote a script for chia plotting that always copies the finished plot to the plot drive with the most capa… IanCutress: I'm slowly acquiring storage for a different project and thought I'd put the 100TB or so of drives to… IanCutress: Not yet, still trying to figure out if there's anything that can trip it up/make it look nice/easier to… IanCutress: Already in use. RyanSmithAT: We're cracking away on it! only received the phones a few days ago, so there's still quite a bit of work left to do andreif7: TLDR A15 is very large jump both in GPU and CPU.There's some wild variations there, one needs to se… andreif7: I have no thoughts, every SoC has something similar. All vendors have very deep modifications of things that don't seem possibl… RyanSmithAT: Aw phooey, not you too! There are worse diseases, but COVID is certainly not an enjoyable experience. RyanSmithAT: Aww man, sorry to hear you caught it.☹️FWIW, I'm a week clear of COVID, and while all of the main… For whatever reason it goes a lot faster that way than having… RyanSmithAT: If you're not already, use iTunes to do it.
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