which store did u end up going
also yeah i totally forgot about vm even though i'm using parrellel to run win 10 for my games. HT makes a big difference there.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
i5 or i7?
- Thread starter Mavimao
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
also yeah i totally forgot about vm even though i'm using parrellel to run win 10 for my games. HT makes a big difference there.
I went to Queens Center because it was convenient. Very much a mall, busy place despite the downpour. The guy who served me is a jazz musician, and we had an interesting talk about the mini, which he's thinking of purchasing himself.
He raised the question of RAM on his own. He said that there had been a store meeting about it and that employees were told to tell customers that installing their own RAM will not void the warranty.
Last edited:
Any software that's using multi-threading can benefit from HT if the total number of created threads is bigger than the number of real physical cores (and in some cases, even if it’s not). The OS has to support it though. Intel only has HT in the top i9 9th gen CPU and the reason is probably related to the risk of side-channel attacks.
I'm surprised that the NY stores don't have the i7 in stock yet. Some of these stores do a lot of international business, and I would have thought that they'd have that option available by now, if only having regard to that clientele.
I also think that the failure to have i7 minis available early may result in a lot of exchanges that could easily be avoided.
Yes, that's basically what I have been saying in the posts in this thread. Add that HT is a legacy Intel feature in their CPUs that goes back to the Pentium 4 (from years 2000-2008). Before the introduction of mass scale consumer multi-core CPUs it was the well marketed feature that Intel claimed differentiated it from previous generations of x86 based processors. I'm not sure about increased risks for side channel attacks with modern HT featured CPUs or whether that is related to all the well publicized vulnerabilities related to older branch prediction technologies.
It seems Intel has been re-introducing it in some of their Pentium-class branded line of CPUs in recent years...
https://www.extremetech.com/computi...gs-hyper-threading-pentium-branded-processors
Last edited:
My, admittedly limited, experience with Apple stores is that they generally don't have stock other than the standard configurations described on the website. Any time I play with configurations I get a message saying I can pick it up at the nearest Apple store today if it's a standard configuration. As soon as I select non standard options the delivery time to my residence is about the same as the date on which I can pick it up at the store. B&H and Adorama often stock non standard configurations. But otherwise it always seems built to order.
I'm planning to go Apple store later tonight - i5 or i7
Which ones are best for the photoshop or VMware (Windows 10 IIS web development) and why i5 or i7?
Does Intel UHD Graphics 630 even support 10-bit billions of colors?
if you got your mac mini 2018 - how do you like it?
Which ones are best for the photoshop or VMware (Windows 10 IIS web development) and why i5 or i7?
Does Intel UHD Graphics 630 even support 10-bit billions of colors?
if you got your mac mini 2018 - how do you like it?
HT appears as extra cores to the OS. So even if one application was fully utilizing 6 cores HT allows other applications to run at the same time. It is just complicated since HT cores don't run quite as fast, since there is more contention within the basic cores. Which is why applications specially written for HT can run better than applications just written for multiple cores.
If we assume that
In the case of the new minis, if an application can fully utilize 8-12 threads, it should run better on the i7 than the i5. But probably not double the speed, since there is higher contention on resources within the core, cache, interface to RAM, etc.
As CPU design advances, I think that Intel realizes that they have the headroom to make more full cores rather than just increase the number with HT. The i3 going from 2 cores (4 HT) to 4 cores. The i5 going from 4 cores to 6 cores (rather than 4 cores, 8 HT). Many PC use cases don't need all that many cores, and Intel still wants to differentiate their product lines. Sell Enthusiast models and Xeon models for much higher prices. Many cores and threads on server CPUs come in handy since they are likely used for virtualization, which can fully utilize the extra cores with multiple servers installed on them.
My research field is ML/AI, not security, so I haven't tried this myself but I keep an eye on it now and then. Here's a somewhat recent paper: https://i.blackhat.com/us-18/Thu-Au...rotecting-Your-CPU-Caches-is-Not-Enough-w.pdf. They shared this work early with OpenBSD, which is (at least part of) the reason HT is now disabled in OpenBSD: https://www.mail-archive.com/source-changes@openbsd.org/msg99141.html. I wonder if/when others will follow.
Since I've read this a couple of times on this forum, I wonder what is an application 'specifically' written for HT and how do you do that? HT works with any multi-threaded application as long as the OS supports it. The OS will run the thread in any way it sees fit. Or are you talking about a CPU affinity mask to bind a thread to a specific CPU? How would I make it run HTed then? Wouldn't I have to make sure that specific CPU is running enough threads to utilize HT in the first place?
I think some OS's provide hooks, such as affinity, so programs can either indicate they should work on the same processor or on separate processors, depending on data usage. Also, if programs use many instructions that are known to have conflicts for shared resources, they could indicate separate cores, or write the secondary thread to be more friendly.
I believe HT was introduced to by Intel average consumers with the introduction of the Pentium 4 (I don't recall if it was part of their earlier IA-64 CPU technology or not). Pentium 4 processor design was marketed as having an advantage due to certain technologies and HT was one of the big ones that was marketed. At the time the code had to be written to utilize HT which locked in the advantage for Intel CPUs since at the time you needed HT to see the extra performance benefits on newer operating systems such as Windows and for newer written software such as gaming software, CAD, etc.. Later on technology similar to HT was introduced into other CPU designs... like AMD's AMD64 (x86-64) CPUs (although don't quote me on that..it might have been somewhat like HT in later designs...it's called SMT).
[doublepost=1541872709][/doublepost]
I wonder if this is what you were referring to in the earlier post...
https://arstechnica.com/information...erthreading-exploit-that-pilfers-crypto-keys/
Last edited:
I think there was a Xeon before that, but both in the same year. No doubt, back then HT was a different beast and required to do more code wise. For more recent software development, I don't think one has to do anything to take advantage of additional threads and HT. It works very well out of the box using "normal" processes and threads.
Have not seen that article, but yes. More and more security issues show up with HT. Those issues have always been there, it's just that nobody noticed until they opened a can of worms with Meltdown and Spectre. In the past, these sort of attacks have been on hardware (there's a somewhat recent CCC talk of hacking the Nintendo Switch by sniffing the eMMC bus among other things), but now it's software related where no physical access to the hardware is necessary. I don't think there's reason to panic yet, but wouldn't be surprised if more and more issues with HT are discovered in the next year of two. I found Intel not putting HT in their latest CPU a little concerning. Do they know something big that we don't yet? Of course HT can always be disabled, it's just one question that remains... is buying a HT CPU worth it now when down the road Apple, Microsoft, Linux might disable support? Personally, I'd probably go for an i7 in the Mini and if HT gets disables one day, just live with it.
Yes, Like you I'm still on board with the i7 and HT. I am really a fan of hardware that supports legacy technologies. As an example many of my Mac Minis are set up with VMs to run parallel port accessed HP Laserjet printers from the early 1990s (parallel port to Ethernet adapters) and COM serial port driven fax modems (USB to serial converter). You can access twenty five year old legacy hardware (and older) on the latest Mac using hardware adapters and Windows VMs.
That's interesting about the Nintendo Switch. The hacks keep coming and they will never stop. We have to rely on Intel and the others for support on their fixes. Meanwhile they are supposedly finding grain of sand sized hack chips on our main boards that Apple and other major companies never knew were there. It's becoming a more interesting world every day regarding privacy and security.
[doublepost=1541881701][/doublepost]
If you are going to be running VMware I would recommend the i7... especially if you are doing Windows development. The i7 CPU features are geared more for business professionals, developers and legacy software support which is always a plus to have it now rather that wishing later that you had bought the i7. I would also recommend an absolute minimum of 16GB RAM and minimum 512GB drive (generally that should be good but you could possibly want more if you want to clone a lot of VMs as backups...but you could also add an external drive for storage if needed).
Last edited:
Well said. But in this case in particular depending on how quiet the user wants the Mac Mini to operate, the i3 may be the best choice. Apparently it is the only option where it isn’t audible even on full loads.
As someone who works in computer security I can say these vulnerabilities (and corresponding exploits) are of concern when using shared resources (such as virtualization used in cloud hosting). For the end user desktop these are essentially none issues.
There are much more effective ways to compromise an end users system besides one of these processor based vulnerabilities.
T extension CPUs are 35W so much less likely to overheat (in the same casing and fan situation)
He raised the question of RAM on his own. He said that there had been a store meeting about it and that employees were told to tell customers that installing their own RAM will not void the warranty.[/QUOTE]
Very relieved to read this right here. I thought so, never, ever has Apple put replaceable part in their computers and then punished people for upgrading those parts themselves. But people were insisting that upgrading RAM will void the warranty. Even some "respected" media sites were spreading this misinfo.
Thank you very much for this. Now, we have settled this once and for all.
Very relieved to read this right here. I thought so, never, ever has Apple put replaceable part in their computers and then punished people for upgrading those parts themselves. But people were insisting that upgrading RAM will void the warranty. Even some "respected" media sites were spreading this misinfo.
Thank you very much for this. Now, we have settled this once and for all.
While I think it's highly unlikely changing the memory in the new Mini would void the warranty I wouldn't place a lot of weight into the statement of one of their Geniuses to settle the matter once and for all.
I'm not sure about that since the wattage is regulated depending on how much power is needed by the system. I believe 65w or 35w is related to the maximum power that can be supplied to the entire system. In general there is truth to your wattage correlation with CPUs but my real world experience with the modern power saving CPUs has been increased workload on the CPU (along with clock speed) is the biggest issue with overheating and not whether it's an i5 or i7.
It seems that the i7 does handle higher work loads before maxing out it's resources. While running VMs My 2011 i5 2.3Ghz Mac Mini and my 2012 i5 2.5Ghz MBP tend to overheat with audibly higher fan speeds much more often than my 2012 i7 2.3Ghz Mac Minis ever do. I haven't run any actually temperature tests but the additional cores of the quad i7 actually seem to have better thermal performance (actually and more specifically lower fan speeds) under heavy computational load compared to when I am pushing the dual core i5 Macs to their limits.
Last edited:
Many thanks for the advice, The problems the price is too high for the i7 and 512GB SSD space!
Could I get away with standard i5 with 6 cores, 256GB and 8gb? - Surely I will add the maybe 16 or 32GB RAM later stage using the 3rd party.
Last edited:
A typical processor core has more hardware (such as decoders and execution units) than it usually needs at any given time, so a limited number of operations can be performed simultaneously on the same CPU core. The modern operating systems are well aware of simultaneous multithreading and its pitfalls. The scheduler will start moving tasks to "virtual" cores only after all the physical cores are more or less fully booked.
What processor/memory settings do you recommend for a VMware Fusion virtual machine running Windows 10? I mainly use it for TradeStation, running in the background all day.