MAC MINI REVIEW 2020 PRO
MAC MINI REVIEW 2020 MAC

MAC MINI REVIEW 2020 MAC

If you thought 3.4 times the performance was a wild projection, Apple says the purpose-built Neural Network in the M1 is 15 times faster at machine learning tasks than the Core i3 in the base Mac mini before it. First up is a '16-core' machine learning component. Once we get past the Arm64 cores, Apple has packed a lot of extra functionality into the M1. As such, be sure to order as much internal storage and RAM as reasonably possible when ordering. External storage will have to suffice if you want to expand the system. The same is true for the NVMe solid state storage, which is both soldered and encrypted by Apple's T2, which was a separate chip in the past, but has been baked into the M1. Because of its soldered positioning, and also due to the lack of LPDDR4X DIMMs in the wild, it is not user-upgradeable like the previous Mac mini. While the company doesn't talk about the RAM type publicly, we know from iFixit's teardownВ of the MacBooks that Apple used SKHynix's LPDDR4X memory right on the CPU package. Unfortunately, and unlike Intel Macs, sysctl does not display any of the hw.cpufrequency stats.ДЄpple outfits all the new M1 Macs with 8 GB to 16 GB of what it calls 'unified' memory. Clock speeds vary, but according to Geekbench, the M1 maxes out at 3.2 GHz. We can somewhat get a gander at clock speeds as well, but only a single speed gets reported. The energy-efficient cores have 192 kB of total L1 cache a piece and a shared 4 MB L2 cache. At any rate, the high-performance cores have 320 kB of L1cache a piece and share a 12 MB L2 cache. We can see a lot of information and pipe it into grep, filtering it down to just the cache statistics. The company doesn't get too much into architecture in its official documentation, but one option open to us is the sysctl tool. Apple gave the M1 four performance-focused 'Firestorm' cores and four more power-efficient 'Icestorm' cores. That means that there's no x86 compatibility at a hardware level, but macOS Big Sur has a solution that we'll talk about in a moment. All of Apple's home-grown mobile designs currently implement the Arm64 instruction set architecture (ISA), and the M1 shares that same heritage.

As everybody knows by now, the heart of the Mac mini is an Apple M1 processor. Before we go too far, though, let's meet the late 2020 Mac mini with its M1 processor.ДЄpple M1 (4 Performance Cores, 4 Efficiency Cores, 16-core Neural Network)Д§.7 x 7.7 x 1.4 inches (197 x 197 x 36 millimeters)Дўx Thunderbolt 4 (up to 40 Gb/s bi-directional)Д«efore we go too far, we need to talk a bit about what we can glean about how Apple Silicon works. Still, the M1 has to outrun this processor to have any hope of confirming the kind of incredible gains that Apple claims should be realized. It's not the base model that Apple used in its comparison with the new M1 chip. It's a 2018 Mac mini with an 8th-generation Intel Core i5-8500B.

Even better, we have a previous-generation Mac mini handy for comparison. That means we couldn't provide launch-day coverage, but it also means that this unit should be representative of any M1-powered Mac mini bought from an Apple retailer.ДЄt $699, Apple's cheapest Mac could actually wind up being a bargain, if its promised performance improvements were anything close to reality. That's right, this isn't a press preview kit you're looking at, this is a real live Mac mini straight off the shelf of a major retailer. So, we did what any curious spectator would do we bought one just to see what the hype was all about. However, proclaiming things like 'more than three times the performance,' without substantiating those claims, will also spur its share of detractors. That's the sort of thing that could make a Mac lover's eyes pop. For instance, the company said that its new Apple Silicon offers upwards of 3.4 times the performance as the last-generation Mac mini with a quad-core Intel Core i3 processor. Apple's performance claims were incredible.

MAC MINI REVIEW 2020 PRO

When Apple announced its new Mac lineupВ - consisting of a MacBook Air, MacBook Pro 13, and Mac mini - with its new M1 processor, the company was met with a mixture of enthusiasm and skepticism.

Mac mini review 2020