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M1X/M2 mac mini in 2021?

pshufd said:
The biotech industry is a big user of Intel Macs and there are a lot of tools that are simply not ready for M1 and it will probably take a couple of years to get them ported, running and certified. It's not really an industry any vendor wants to lose.
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Can you elaborate how biotech depends on Intel macs? I have worked with aerospace and defense companies so I'm familiar with certification processes for software and hardware. But even in there, they could do quite a bit in two years. I expect a similar situation for biotech.

Aside from such certification situations, my impression is that most professionals who need x86 need it for either legacy software or for simulating user environments. Both cases can be overcome easily with VMs at work, through a vpn or in the cloud. It's the route me and some colleagues are taking. That leaves gamers and we all know Apple wants them on their OSses, not via bootcamp on Windows.

Apple has it all figured out. Intel macs are going the way of the dodo.
 
PeterJP said:
Can you elaborate how biotech depends on Intel macs? I have worked with aerospace and defense companies so I'm familiar with certification processes for software and hardware. But even in there, they could do quite a bit in two years. I expect a similar situation for biotech.

Aside from such certification situations, my impression is that most professionals who need x86 need it for either legacy software or for simulating user environments. Both cases can be overcome easily with VMs at work, through a vpn or in the cloud. It's the route me and some colleagues are taking. That leaves gamers and we all know Apple wants them on their OSses, not via bootcamp on Windows.

Apple has it all figured out. Intel macs are going the way of the dodo.
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I'm relaying what my son told me. He works in oncogenomics (his manager did the labwork on my cancer mutation for free) and his laptop needs to be replaced and his organization has determined that they can't move off x64 in the near term. Likely for a couple of years.
 
I would assume that biotech uses a lot of GPU acceleration which is simply not available with ARM based Macs.
 
b.lam said:
I would assume that biotech uses a lot of GPU acceleration which is simply not available with ARM based Macs.
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He told me some of the applications but I didn't really pay attention as it's not my area. I'll have to pay better attention when he talks about it in the future.
 
pshufd said:
He told me some of the applications but I didn't really pay attention as it's not my area. I'll have to pay better attention when he talks about it in the future.
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It's possible that these apps need to be ported to M1 for optimal performance. Stuff like genome folding (one of the few biotech applications I know) can have a real benefit of hardware optimisation, e.g. using the Intel vector processing instructions. There is no equivalent on ARM and it may slow down the calculations by a factor of 10. So either Apple build them into a next gen M2, which still means lots of porting work. Or the software company making the tools are going to have to port them to the new Apple GPU inside the M series, which is even more work.
 
I still think Apple will be release a 2021 new Mac Mini instead of the new rumor of 2023!
 
I don't think they have the luxury of sufficient chip volume at this time to focus on the MM. I suspect it will be a while before we see anything updated.
 
LeeW said:
I don't think they have the luxury of sufficient chip volume at this time to focus on the MM. I suspect it will be a while before we see anything updated.
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I think that the MacBook Pros are higher margin and there's clearly demand. They will also be able to blow all laptops out of the water in terms of CPU performance unless there's a desktop Ryzen 5950X chip in some laptop with a 300 Watt PSU out there. A Mini would be competitive with the fastest desktop chips out there and still slower than ThreadRippers, but those are really more server-class chips.

The Mini has certainly been the ignored stepchild in Apple's lineup. They could at least update the CPU in the Intel model to 11th gen.
 
LeeW said:
I don't think they have the luxury of sufficient chip volume at this time to focus on the MM. I suspect it will be a while before we see anything updated.
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Apple orders their chips far in advanced, and has first dibs at TSMC for new fab processes. Because of this, Apple wasn’t effected too much by the chip shortages, but delays for Apple products have come from other issues in the supply chain, like miniLED.

I’d even bet that the MM is ready to go, but Apple delayed launch to coincide with the MacBook Pro which was delayed due to display shortages.
 
LeeW said:
Huh? Apple themselves have said they have been heavily affected by shortages.
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Not heavily, and not 5nm and the advanced nodes. They said they were effected because of displays and legacy nodes.
 
People are still in awe of the M1, so perhaps Apple are ready for the kill by introducing M1X a year after M1's introduction - with competitors still trying to catch up - releasing the so called pro versions of their line up, in which case Mac mini is just as relevant, as its top model still runs on Intel.
 
roundski said:
Hope this isn't true:
https://twitter.com/x/status/1427688425113726982
delayed till 2022?
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It would not surprise me at all.

I was expecting it at WWDC so I waited. Then I finally bought an M1 in July and am happy that I did though I would like more. What would help is if they gave us an idea as to when. Of course they may not know themselves when. I have also been toying around with getting a second M1 so I would have a M1X of sorts, just in two computers instead of one.
 
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