I wish they had used the
S.uper
T.remendously
E.xceptionally
V.ersatile
E.ntity
instead.
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Apple Silicon Mac mini Predictions
- Thread starter Yebubbleman
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I wish they had used the
S.uper
T.remendously
E.xceptionally
V.ersatile
E.ntity
instead.
Who said I think the i5 would trounce the ARM? I am referring mostly to graphics performance for gaming. I am hoping for a AS Mini to be released in November with significantly better gaming performance, and performance in general, than my 2015 iMac. I don't doubt the raw performance of a 2020 ARM over a 2015 i5, but we know little about what they are going to do for graphics in a desktop model.
There's a report out today indicating that the A14 could have a bigger version with more cores, more applicable to a powerful desktop. https://www.macrumors.com/2020/10/27/apple-silicon-imac-coming-1h-2021-a14t/
So I stand by my (crazy) idea: Apple Silicon could show up in an iMac Pro in the next 6 months
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“Because it’s more important in mobile” is only true if we are also including laptops in that category. FileVault on non-T2 Macs and BitLocker on Windows rely heavily on the CPU acceleration of AES to work. And every device can benefit from faster HTTPS/SSL/TLS encryption.
But as has already been pointed out, it is only weighted at 5%. If you focus on things like the integer and floating point values, things still look competitive.
Don’t confuse CPU and GPU here. Games stress the GPU for the most part, but rely on both for good performance. So a synthetic CPU benchmark is not a good approximation of gaming performance.
According to Geekbench though, the CUs in a desktop GPU also completely outclass the iPad Pro. Hell, the mobile GPUs in the 16” MacBook Pro are around 3x faster than the iPad Pro based on Metal compute. According to Geekbench, they are in the same category as an Intel iGPU from a 2020 13” MacBook, but faster than the 2018 Mini, which seems accurate.
It’s more amazing that they handle the workload of accelerating games as well as they do. I wouldn’t call them competitive with a dGPU at this point, though. So I’m still skeptical myself about how Apple is supposed to cut ties with AMD without also aggressively improving their GPU game.
I’m mostly hopeful that things like the Mac Mini can operate a 4K display in scaled mode, or actually use some Metal compute in Affinity Photo without the GPU falling over.
Depends on the workload. But for CPU & SSD I/O bound stuff, I’m not that worried.
The bigger issue is that with software being more reliant on networking these days, that places its own bottleneck on day to day use as you wait for stuff to come across the wire. That tends to mask over the benefits of a faster CPU in certain scenarios. And with Apple using anemic iGPUs in most of the lineup, and their current A-series GPUs not really being much better, I’m not hopeful we will see competitive gaming performance anytime soon.
But the CPU and ASIC blocks? That’s Apple’s strength right now.
There is a point of diminishing returns. Performance always has been important to me and hence when I was about to make the choice whether to encrypt the internal storage on my portable Macs I did a lot benchmarking before and after. This was done on non T2 equipped Macs and the differences were minor, even on 2012 15" MBP. In case you are wondering, no I didn't just run Blackmagic Speed Test to see how fast my SSD can sequentially read and write massive files and had a beer and called it a day. Day to day browsing and network use is not bottlenecked by HTTPS/SSL or TLS decryption or encryption. Sure, my iPhone can do encryption tasks much faster than my 2012 MBP. Does it matter to an end user? Windows Hello is just as fast on my, according to Geekbench, much slower i7 Windows laptop when compared to face unlock on an iPad Pro from a user point of view. Anyway, this is straying a bit off-topic and may look like an attempt to move the goal posts.
I am not confusing the GPU and CPU at all, but admitedly it was a flippant remark without much thought in it. Substitute that with a CPU heavy game with a multitude of agents that hardly touches the GPU. Most of the games that I do play in my spare time are in this category.
It is certainly exciting times ahead.
I am not confusing the GPU and CPU at all, but admitedly it was a flippant remark without much thought in it. Substitute that with a CPU heavy game with a multitude of agents that hardly touches the GPU. Most of the games that I do play in my spare time are in this category.
It is certainly exciting times ahead.
It is straying off-topic, but people keep bringing it up because you keep bringing it up. I don’t think anyone’s claiming that the crypto perf is what makes the Apple Silicon look good, or that it is actually all that important for day-to-day beyond cutting down on latency in places. But folks are getting the impression that you believe the Geekbench results are inflated by the crypto results.
And those sort of games should be fine on Apple Silicon. Apple would pretty much need to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory by under-provisioning the cores on their desktop silicon (i.e. too many low-power cores vs performance cores).
While not impossible, it’s not likely the folks working on Apple’s SoC teams will make that rudimentary a mistake.
When it comes to the Mini, I’d honestly expect something in the range of 6-8 performance cores, with 4 efficiency cores, using the same cores developed for the A14. Use a beefed up GPU like what we’d expect to see in the A14X, and a Mini based around that would be a rather nice upgrade from what we have today on Intel, IMO.
You did not say that. Someone else expressed their worry that the i5 would trounce the ARM in a reply to you. I replied to that person, not to you. Clear?
I was reply to jazzn1's post:
"It struck me that potentially the ARM MacMini might outperform the 2015 iMac. I suppose some of that supposition is that what ever graphics engine the ARM MacMini has would outperform what is my 2015 iMac. Then of course the 2015 iMac‘s i5 should trounce the ARM."
For graphics performance, I would agree that it's not yet clear what Apple Silicon will offer. I think it will match the entry-level discrete GPUs, but it will take some time to match the higher-level GPUs - maybe even requiring that Apple develop their own dGPU. But then how would that work in unified memory?
I don't think so. The Mac Mini will get a desktop level CPU, so it will be something more in line with the iMac series, but with a less powerful GPU.
Who cares if it runs 1 synthetic benchmark faster. Question is, can it run Crysis?
Fully agree. All the 'Intel' tabs on the tech specs pages are just waiting for an X variant or something to replace them.
Possibly yes, but it may be called an M2 chip. The purpose of the M1 Mini is to get Apple Silicon into as many developers hands as possible I think.
The M2 will be the next gen of chips. I mean they’ll announce an M1X chip just like they do with the A-series (A12 vs A12x vs A12z as examples).
They could easily have two different minis, one with the M1 chip for the entry level and one with the M1X chip as the top end.
Just how now they have the i3 on the low end and the i7 on the top end. They’re both still part of the same chip gen.
Sure they could but Apple doesn’t want to sell Intel machines for long. Right now their website is a bit awkward because they’re selling both M-Series and Intel together which can be confusing. The sooner than can switch an entire product over to M-series the better.
Apple won’t introduce the M2-series until likely a year from now (as it’ll be based off of the A15 chips most likely). That’s why I’m saying if they’re already going to be designing the M1X chip for the 16” MacBook Pro and iMac, why not also use it in their top-tier mini and then get rid of all Intel options for the mini ASAP.
Apple has said the transition will take two years. I am personally not in a hurry for them to switch the entire product line over. I hope they take their time.
Right thats largely because it’ll take two years to get to the Mac Pro level of 28-core processing and Vega II Duo. Not because they want to take two years. They are working their way from bottom to top. So they started with the Air, baseline mini, and baseline MBP. The next step is the top-end MBP, top end mini, and baseline iMac.
I agree but then again, look at iPads. The iPad (not Air, Pro or Mini, just iPad) comes with an older gen chip as the starting point - so does mini. They might use an M2 next gen chip for the higher end lineup next year, keeping starting devices on M1 and keeping the entry point a generation behind going forward after that. I hope it'll be differentiated by an M1, M1X, M1T, M1XT or whatever structure rather than use a generational approach, but it is possible
On the CPU side I fully expected this, but they're a bit above my GPU expectations. They did a great job.
That doesn’t make sense though. The whole point of a higher end pro model I features that the lower end one doesn’t have. If the higher end one gets the M2 what does the lower end one get?
The M2 will almost certainly have the same things people complain about like 2 ports, because it’s the lowest end chip.