Realistic CPU performance for updated Mac Mini?

[Cloudsurfer]

If the suggested mockups from Bjohnson or Cloudsurfer are realized at launch, then I will choose to go with the current model.

The bad thing about waiting to confirm if those rumors are true is that, if it is, then it will be too late to get one ordered from the online Apple store.

Unless I run down to the local store immediately the day of launch and beg for the old model, if they have any left.

I'm hoping for an upgraded current design, because I want the dual drives and the ports on the back. I really wanted to see a better GPU, whether Iris, Iris Pro, or other and a CPU upgrade as well. But if they go with those rumored routes, then good for some, just not for me.

Oh well, decisions, decisions.

Couldn't agree more, however I'd personally look into a 21,5" iMac at that point. The screen may be a bitch to get off but at least it's got socketed memory and both PCIe and SATA connectors. I'd use the screen of my current mini to make a dual screen setup and call it a day.

But first and foremost I really hope the mini has at the very least socketed ram. I could live with having PCI only storage.

 

[venom600]

Here is what my source is telling me.

The next mac mini will use haswell, They have 2 in development, a mac mini and a mac micro. The mini will be shorter and smaller. It will use pcie flash storage and will have ram soldered to motherboard. So imagine the size of it now, take out the space for the 2 hard drives and that is your mac mini.

For the micro they are toying with 2 designs. One is based off the macbook air cpu at 1.3ghz haswell. It will have half the storage because the pcie card is shorter and half the ram so figure 4-8gb. It will be around the size of the apple tv but a bit larger. Then the other one they are testing is the micro that uses the A8 chip. They are co-developing osx to run on that chip but they are running into performance issues so it might not come out until the A9 chip. It will be a fanless design. Their target in performance is a 5000 geekbench or higher for this model but they are just under that at 4500 so not sure if they want to release it yet.

Thats all I know right now. It's gonna be a super seller though. Think of having a computer that small. Apple is trying to outdo the intel NUC so think of that size and scale down from there.

So you're saying that after watching the horror show that is Windows RT, Apple decided to do the same thing? That makes zero sense. There is zero benefit to porting OS X to ARM. None of the applications would work and iOS apps aren't designed to be used with a mouse and keyboard. Porting to ARM would unnecessarily segment OS X and weaken it as a platform. There is no upside, especially when Intel's Bay Trail chips outperform ARM for the same price and efficiency without losing X86 compatibility. Also, what would be the benefit of having a desktop computer that small? The Mac Mini is too small as it is as far as I'm concerned.

 

[jlanpheer]

Get TO it!

Thanks for the comments. It's hard to say what Apple will do in terms of connectors and other components, so in this thread I purely focused on the CPU.

My own usage is mostly music production, using Logic - so a better GPU will not help me at all.

Hey man, i was on the fence too waiting for the same reasons and goals. I wanted to transition to my music production machine, but didn't want to jump the gun and buy a Mini if a new one was coming out soon that was going to be much more powerful. As a result, my music-making came to a virtual standstill for nearly 6 months (and this was last year, imagine if i were STILL waiting.....)!

I decided that the rumored "upgraded Mini" was not going to be a much more significantly powerful machine and dramatically improved graphics (while desireable) were not the reason that i wanted the machine in the first place. I decided to make the jump, and i'm happy i did. I upgraded the RAM to the max and put a 2nd SSD boot drive in and my system performance is great so far.

There's just no evidence to suggest that what you are waiting for is going to come, at least anytime soon. So, there's no reason for you to delay. My Mini came with Mountain Lion, and i upgraded right away (perhaps hastily) to Mavericks, which has caused me some compatibility issues with some software i already owned (most notably Native Instruments' Kontakt). Logic X still has some issues too that they are working thru. If i were to advise you on your OS, i might recommend staying with ML for the time being, but that's a question for a whole different forum.

If a substantially-faster Mini WERE to appear, you could easily (a) sell the one that you bought (resale value is good) or (b) chain it to the hypothesized newer/faster one and run your VSTs/AUs on it.

Don't wait any longer man, life is short so MAKE MUSIC!

cheers!

 

[Crosscreek]

Here is what my source is telling me.

The next mac mini will use haswell, They have 2 in development, a mac mini and a mac micro. The mini will be shorter and smaller. It will use pcie flash storage and will have ram soldered to motherboard. So imagine the size of it now, take out the space for the 2 hard drives and that is your mac mini.

For the micro they are toying with 2 designs. One is based off the macbook air cpu at 1.3ghz haswell. It will have half the storage because the pcie card is shorter and half the ram so figure 4-8gb. It will be around the size of the apple tv but a bit larger. Then the other one they are testing is the micro that uses the A8 chip. They are co-developing osx to run on that chip but they are running into performance issues so it might not come out until the A9 chip. It will be a fanless design. Their target in performance is a 5000 geekbench or higher for this model but they are just under that at 4500 so not sure if they want to release it yet.

Thats all I know right now. It's gonna be a super seller though. Think of having a computer that small. Apple is trying to outdo the intel NUC so think of that size and scale down from there.

That is not going to beat the Broadwell NUC that Intel is going to market this year.
OSX will not run on ARM.
I think the problem is that Intel is keeping the Broadwell chips to themselves and will try to get a big part in the mini wars that are going on.

 

[Cloudsurfer]

I would not be so sure OSX will never run on ARM. It could very well be that they have internal builds of ARM OSX like they had x86 builds during the PPC era. (Heck, iOS = OSX)

Switiching to ARM has many advantages for Apple, for one they would control development as they design their own chips, so they don't have to be at the mercy of intel's ticks and tocks.

The A7 already has similair GB3 scores to my 2010 mini, and it's running at half the speed. Imagine what an A7 could achieve at desktop clock speeds, not to mention A8 and beyond.

Apple has a long way to go to catch up with Intel, but it's certainly not impossible.

However I feel it is unlikely we will see a switch to Mac ARM soon. They are likely not going to make the switch until they are confident enough that the performance equals or exceeds Intels chips, which won't be for many years.

 

[ddjohns1]

Crystal Well- like specs, PLEASE!

The only taxing applications I use on a PC/Mac are photo processing apps like Lightroom. The performance of the 2.6GHz MBP Retina "Crystal Well" for such applications look outstanding from performance comparisons I've seen at macperformanceguide.com.

I want the option of upgrading to a 4k monitor so I'm not that keen on an iMac. I don't need the power of a MacPro.

I just need a mac mini with a 512k PCIe SSD and the same processor as the high end MBP Retina.

Haswell with good Iris graphics is just fine with me. CPU specs that matter are burst/turbo speed, IRIS, and actually I think the memory I/O speed is more important than anything with large photo files in light room. PCIe please.

If Apple did this, they would have a very popular product IMHO.

 

[Schnort]

The A7 does well against the core2duo because of a few reasons:
- memory subsystem (there's a lot less between the processor and the memory)
- specialized instructions that greatly accelerate some of the individual tests

http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench3/compare/429180?baseline=429157

AES and SHA are used in encryption algorithms, and modern processors have added instructions and coprocessors that greatly accelerate their performance.

DFFT and JPEG decompression are also places where specialized instructions can make a huge difference. You can see the asymmetry where the A7 decompression is much better than the C2D, but the compression results are the opposite.

Vector math and SIMD have also become staples of modern co-processors, which is another reason the A7 wins big on some of these tests.

It's all about focusing hardware on specific issues (that just happen to be tested in geekbench).

But for general purpose computing? They're really not in the same ballpark. The A7 is about half the MIPs/Mhz as the core2duo, from what I've read (4.5 vs. 8)

 

[thekev]

Haswell with good Iris graphics is just fine with me. CPU specs that matter are burst/turbo speed, IRIS, and actually I think the memory I/O speed is more important than anything with large photo files in light room. PCIe please.

If Apple did this, they would have a very popular product IMHO.

You won't notice a few Mhz of memory speed from one generation to the next. You'll notice when the system is low on memory and constantly paging or PS is constantly writing to its designated scratch disks.

So the answer from the benchmark data is actually a non-answer… if Apple were to choose a processor like the i7-4850HQ, it definitely would not make sense for me to wait any longer. 3% would not be a big enough difference to make me regret the purchase. However, with the i7-4960HQ, it would be a different story - this is a more substantial improvement.

Any compelling reasons why Apple would choose one or the other (or a completely different CPU)?

Why would you expect anything different? They must pull from what actually exists. Did you look at the price of a 4960HQ relative to previous components? It seems unlike Apple to go for something that costly in a Mini.

 

[jouster]

Interesting thoughts. If there is anything to it, I would suspect the "micro" could actually a next-generation Apple TV with extra features. Especially the A8-based variant would be very close to what the Apple TV currently already is. Consider also that Apple's development teams do not always seem to be told what product exactly they are working on.

The Mini design you mention sounds like a design I would not want to buy. Soldered-in RAM will be a nuisance, and drive up the price for those people who prefer cheaper 3rd-party RAM. Regarding storage, I myself prefer at least 1 TB of internal SSD storage. The upgrade price for that in the nMP is $800 - that's a little less than what you pay for 2x1 TB Samsung 840 EVO, not counting that in that case you could even offset some cost by selling the original 256 GB SSD.

Also, I find the Geekbench score thing a bit hard to believe. If Apple manages to double performance again with the A8, then the multi-core score of an A8 would be in the 5000 region. But would Apple really use Geekbench for their own internal development benchmark?

What would you really do with such a small computer? I much prefer the small computer with attached display I already carry around - my iPhone.

I'd run OS X, which is tricky on an iPhone.

 

[crenz]

I'd run OS X, which is tricky on an iPhone.

Well, what I'd like to understand is: For which usage scenarios would such a smaller Mac mini offer significant advantages over the existing Mac mini form factor, laptops, or tablets?

And the advantages would be significant to warrant possible disadvantages such as soldered-in ram, no replaceable hard drives etc. if the Mini goes that route, I wonder what people will use as OS X servers…

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Don't wait any longer man, life is short so MAKE MUSIC!

cheers!

You are very right. Don't worry, I still got my old machine to make music on . I might have an upcoming trip where I can buy a Mini at a good price, I plan to buy during that trip no matter whether a new Mini came out.

 

[Count Blah]

If Wireless .ac or Thunderbolt 2 are of interest to you, that might be a reason to wait. If you play games the graphics improvements might make it worthwhile.

If they switch to PCIe flash storage like on MacBooks and the Pro, that would be a big reason to wait. Much faster even than a fusion.

For the processors.. what kind of work do you do with it?

If people are used to HDD, then SATA-III versus PCIe is nearly irrelevant, as long as it's an SSD.

 

[NewbieCanada]

If people are used to HDD, then SATA-III versus PCIe is nearly irrelevant, as long as it's an SSD.

Yes that's true - but the upgrade cost on the current model is the same for a 256 GB SSD and a 1 TB Fusion drive, and someone might think Fusion gives similar performance to an SSD, but it really doesn't

 

[iamthedudeman]

I would not be so sure OSX will never run on ARM. It could very well be that they have internal builds of ARM OSX like they had x86 builds during the PPC era. (Heck, iOS = OSX)

Switiching to ARM has many advantages for Apple, for one they would control development as they design their own chips, so they don't have to be at the mercy of intel's ticks and tocks.

The A7 already has similair GB3 scores to my 2010 mini, and it's running at half the speed. Imagine what an A7 could achieve at desktop clock speeds, not to mention A8 and beyond.

Apple has a long way to go to catch up with Intel, but it's certainly not impossible.

However I feel it is unlikely we will see a switch to Mac ARM soon. They are likely not going to make the switch until they are confident enough that the performance equals or exceeds Intels chips, which won't be for many years.

Actually OSX already runs on ARM processors. iOS is OSX just with a different GUI. Cocoa touch as opposed to Cocoa. iOS and OSX are one in the same at the core level.

Apple already has a prototype fanless Macbook Air running on a A8 processor. They had a prototype Macbook Air running on a A7 processor.

The A7 processor in the Macbook air has the almost the same performance as a MacBook Air from mid–2011. Now take away the thermal constraints and that same A7 can exceed the performance of the mid-2011 macbook air.

Now weather this product is called a Macbook Air I doubt it. I am hearing it is called just a "macbook'.

It will happen sooner then you think.

 

[haravikk]

These rumors about using the Macbook Air processors are just ludicrous. Looking at it from a simple cost perspective, it makes no sense to use more expensive processors in their CHEAPEST Mac.

This is why I'm wondering if they're delaying until nearer the general Broadwell release. While Broadwell in the Mac Mini would be sweet, they may just be delaying the Haswell update in preparation for moving to Broadwell in the rest of their lineup a few months later. At this point they ought to be able to get Haswell parts at a cost that's more viable for the Mac Mini, and while the Macbook Air will be comparatively overpriced for a bit it will be updated not that long after, leap-frogging forward again.

It's all speculation of course, but I'm starting to think that if Broadwell's release hadn't been pushed back then Apple may have released an update by now, even if it wasn't actually to Broadwell for the Mac Mini itself.


I do think that a transition to ARM is a big stretch though; I can see the Apple TV getting a more full-featured version of iOS, maybe integrating new multi-tasking capabilities as rumoured for iOS as a whole, which will make it a much more capable device.

But I just don't think ARM is anywhere close to ready yet for serious desktop use; mobile use and high density servers sure, but that middle space is a while away yet. If Apple wants to make a smaller desktop then they can do that with Intel desktop or NUC parts just as easily, but as others have pointed out there's not much of an advantage to making the Mac Mini so much smaller.

I can definitely see them shaving it down a bit, but personally I'm hoping they swap one 2.5" drive for mSATA flash (since PCIe flash is a bit expensive for a mini desktop) for Fusion Drives, and maybe make both more accessible, i.e - move the CPU right to the top with the fan underneath, SSD under that, then mSATA then RAM, so it's all accessible from below, while trimming down free space to make it a little sleeker still.