With the new M2 Ultra SOCs in the Studio and Mac Pro, you could see the Studio as the sedan and the Mac Pro as the station wagon. Same engine but one has some extra room in the back for ’stuff’.
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Mac Mini vs. Mac Studio Buyer's Guide
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Since all M-chips are assembled based off the same “units” (CPU, GPU cores, neural engines, encoding engines, RAM lines, etc) it might happen that two chips might have same scores on a specific “chip block”:
- All M2s use the same single CPU cores that make up their 8(M2) / 10(M2Pro) / 12 (M2Pro) / 24 (M2Ultra) variants: single core scores will tend to be identical. Even the iPad Pro’s M2.
- If a single core score is considerably higher (say 5%+) there’s maybe some clocking trickery going on for those cases (like Intel’s turbo boost, basically dynamic overclocking on the fly). Plus maybe cache benefits between models. However, for example, L1 and L2 cache levels of M2 Pro and M2 Max are identical, except the L3 where M2 Max is doubled.
- The full M2 Pro 12 core and M2 Max 12 core are basically assembled the same on that CPU front. Synthetic geekbench benchmarks aren’t likely to show any difference there (blind to memory bandwidth and minor cache differences). Same scores.
- But you are definitely right on those GPU scores. Up to 19-cores on M2 Pro and up to 38-cores on M2 Max should yield double the performance. And it tends to, render times on 3D applications are effectively close to halved (when properly developed) or games tend to run a lot better (if GPU was indeed the bottleneck). Those geekbench scores are definitely missing something.
- The rest of the difference is the M2 Max having more of the extra hardware modules and controllers: more encoding/decoding video engines, more memory bandwidth, more thunderbolt controllers, more support for hardware monitors, etc which won’t show at all on the benchmarks.
Sometimes in some applications the performance far from doubles, as was the case for M1 Ultra (supposedly 2 M1 Max). Rendering on Blender Cycles raytracer shows barely 30% extra performance between M1 Max and M1 Ultra. M2 Max is even close to the same as M1 Ultra on that front!
Supposedly the M2 architecture got revised for fixing that “scaling issue”… we will see when the M2 Ultra real life use cases come to light.
Hope that helps to make sense of those scores.
Good for a generic baseline, far from accurate for key real life scenarios… check some of the more complex anandtech benchmarks if time permits, I don’t really know what the score numbers mean in a lot of them but it’s a lot more thorough and the M1s and M2s at the time had numbers in some of the categories that would compete or obliterate the most expensive or most massive workstation CPUs (some could cost more than a single Mac Studio Ultra, just for the CPU).
Thanks so really for the average Joe who is not trying to write a technical paper on this, the only noticeable difference in real world between pro and max assuming everything except the chip is same, is close to 2x gpu performance gain for games etc that has gpu as bottleneck.
Doesn’t seem to be worth it for me as I have a pc for gaming, only uses this for remote work, browsing, and some basic photo editing using the default mac photo app.
Doesn’t seem to be worth it for me as I have a pc for gaming, only uses this for remote work, browsing, and some basic photo editing using the default mac photo app.
Apple silicon was briefly faster than consumer intel chips at single core upon release
Since then no apple cpu can come even close to high end consumer intel or amd performance
True, but Apple Silicon is not meant to compete at the high-end enthusiast market. One of the main reasons Apple developed the M class SoC was because they no longer wanted to try and mitigate the heat and battery life issues that Intel was forcing on them in its race for "ever faster, ever hotter" CPUs because that was the one market Intel was making (serious) money in.
Indeed,
But I also thing this is where apple is missing a market
They are so focused on laptops and concerned about power consumption and heat that they may have given up on making desktop/workstation class CPU’s before they even tried
Why should a $7000 workstation have what is basically a mobile cpu in it?
To be fair, that is where some 80-85% of their Mac revenue comes from (with likely only a few percent from the workstation market). So Apple's focus will be on light laptops that users can comfortably carry all-day and also use all-day with the included battery pack. And in return, those features are part of the reason the significant majority of Mac users buy those laptops.
The Intel Mac Pro benefitted from Intel's focus on the server market (as that is where 80-85% of their revenue and profits were coming from), which allowed Intel to push that down to the workstation (Xeon W) and enthusiast (Core Extreme) markets.
But Apple wanted a workstation that ran cool and quiet because many of their professional and enterprise customers wanted a quiet workstation because they used them beside their desks so Apple cherry-picked components or had customized versions made for them to meet those goals (for example, Apple used "B" series Xeon W CPUs that ran at lower TDPs than the "standard" Intel part, trading a bit of speed to run significantly cooler and therefore not needed loud, high-speed cooling fans).
And if we believe Mark Gurman and Majin Bu and others (and I am inclined to do so), Apple did try and make "workstation class" versions of the M1 and M2 SoC and just hit too many compromises that would not have delivered sufficient value for the price Apple would have charged and therefore would have found little to no market. But those were designed on 5nm processes and 3nm processes are said to bring a lot of advances in power consumption and other areas, so Apple and TSMC might be able to make it work on 3nm.
my intel core i7 mac mini still chugging along fine - love the space grey color
So looks like the first Geekbench reports for the M2 Ultra are in and while CPU performance is only about 13-18% better than the M1 Ultra, GPU performance is significantly better - almost 60% faster on the GFXBench Metal 5.0 Aztec Ruins 4K test.
There is also a thread discussing the performance improvements at https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...-reveal-impressive-performance-gains.2392476/
There is also a thread discussing the performance improvements at https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...-reveal-impressive-performance-gains.2392476/
So I spec‘d out a top end Mac Mini; 12 core, 19 core gpu, 32gb ram, 1TB ssd, 10gb Ethernet for $2299
The Mac Studio; 12 core, 30 core gpu, 32gb ram, 1TB ssd for $2199
If your going all in on a Mini, the Studio is a super deal with a much more powerful M2Max vs the M2Pro, more gpu cores, 2 USB-C, and a SD slot. Can’t beat it.
Mine arrives 6/23 😃
The Mac Studio; 12 core, 30 core gpu, 32gb ram, 1TB ssd for $2199
If your going all in on a Mini, the Studio is a super deal with a much more powerful M2Max vs the M2Pro, more gpu cores, 2 USB-C, and a SD slot. Can’t beat it.
Mine arrives 6/23 😃
Almost a year? The M2 Pro Mac Mini hasn’t even been been out for 5 months.
For me, I was going to get an M2 Pro Mini 32GB/1TB, but hesitated because the pricing was very close to a base studio. Glad I waited so now I’ll be getting a 1TB base studio. Hoping this will last me like 6-7 years.
That's all it ever was, here's 3 levels of performance......and cost. Buy what fills your job needs.
I do not believe it was a thermal issue, considering the sheer size of the heat sink on the Ultra.
As I recall, it was a too small Translation Lookup Buffer (TLB) that was behind the inability of the cores to properly scale as more were utilized and this was fixed in M2.
It boils down to this: the Mac Mini is for fun (unless your definition of 'fun' involves games) and the Mac Studio is for people who actually have work to do
By one very narrow definition of “work”. 😉
There really is a continuum of price+performance from the base model Mini to the top spec Studio. As you spec up the Mini, eventually its price gets up to the prices of the Studio and it makes sense to switch to that model. Because of the amazing Apple Silicon, it’s possible to do real work on each model of Mini and Studio. You just need to look at how much processing power you really need and whether your budget allows you to get there.
Perhaps one might say that if you don't need heavy CPU/GPU use and can get away with the limit of RAM Mini's offer then its a good fit. If you have apps that require more CPU/GPU and the Mini's ceiling for RAM is to low, the move the Studio.
I found the M1 Mini 512/16 was a great performer as long as I didn't have too many things open that consumed RAM. The power of the Mini is more than enough for most people's purposes. I had the M1 Mini but needed more RAM and thus changed over to the studio and haven't looked back.
If one is a student who isn't needing art or say math type of apps, the Mini is a great option (other than the obvious- a laptop).
It was an issue with multiple apps open and more so when web browsers were sucking up RAM in the gigs. A typical situation might be mail app, Safari with 2-5 tabs, Word, and then when I would open up Affinity Photo, it would suffer challenges often related to insufficient RAM. When I switched to the Studio with 64 gigs RAM, ALL issues disappeared of this nature. The only stuttering or pauses were due to some apps and how they behave and not the hardware.
