PC Nerd Tries an Apple M1 Mac Mini

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It’s no secret I’m a PC nerd. I mean, I’m literally surrounded by PC parts right now, and this entire channel is dedicated to checking out PC tech, from gaming to creative. So me having this… is a little strange. I’ve never outright owned an Apple product, I have relatively limited experience with MacOS and have no need for their ‘ecosystem’. Basically, I’m the exact opposite of the target market for this thing, and yet, it’s fascinating. Lets take a look and I’ll show you what I mean.

You’ve probably already seen this a thousand ways from Sunday, but allow me to recap briefly. This is Apple’s Mac Mini, a tiny desktop computer with relatively limited I/O, and previously came with Intel CPUs (for which you can still buy the Intel model, for now). This one though, comes with Apple’s own CPU, based on ‘Apple Silicon’, the M1. This chip was heralded as offering “the world’s fastest CPU core in low-power silicon” and a breakthrough for portable computing. It’s an 8 core chip that offers desktop CPU stomping performance with thin and light laptop levels of power draw – if not better.

The M1 is what piqued my interest. The fact it’s in a Mac Mini doesn’t make much of a difference as despite the expanse of empty space inside this AND the massive heatsink and fan, this chip doesn’t run any faster than the Macbook Air and Pro 13 versions. No what’s interesting is seeing an ARM based CPU running a desktop operating system – and well. I’ve used Microsoft’s Surface Pro X and it was hopeless. Microsoft’s x86 emulator barely worked, when it did it was buggy and not being able to run the vast majority standard applications just made it a dealbreaker so Apple managing it well is genuinely interesting.

Lets take a step back though and explain what makes this unique. ARM, a British company, design processors and licenses those designs to people like Samsung, Qualcomm, and Apple. Those cores aren’t like the cores in your desktop Intel or AMD CPU. They use RISC or reduced instruction set computing which basically means it’s a more optimised design that can run more efficiently, albeit with less built in diversity. Compare that to x86, the instruction set your desktop Intel or AMD CPU uses, along with AMD64 which is it’s 64 bit counterpart. That’s generally less efficiently designed as it’s instruction set is more complex and abstract. RISC runs the exact thing it wants to do, like loading a value, adding to it, and storing it, whereas with x86 you can just tell it to “add” and it’ll go away and get the values, add them and store them again without you having to tell it anything more than “add”.

The reason all that is important is all the software from the operating system to the programs you run are all designed around the x86 instruction set, not RISC, and they aren’t directly compatible. So, for Apple to offer an ARM based chip as a desktop CPU, they are fighting an uphill battle to get a chip that’s going to even boot the operating system, let alone run any programs. So, Apple made a translator. It’s called Rosetta 2, and it’s pretty insane. In my testing, it seems like running a native version of an app can be between 30% and 50% faster than running it through Rosetta, but it’s otherwise flawless. Running ‘Intel’ based apps as it shows in Activity Monitor, open and run without fault. Editing a video in Premiere is seamless as if I was editing on an Intel CPU. Microsoft, take notes.

So, why go to all the effort of using an ARM based chip if everyone else is using x86 happily? This is why. Here I am running Blender render, and you are seeing the total system power draw – every electron flying through the power wire to make this machine drive a 1440p display, and render this scene. 30 Watts. 30. When you factor in power supply losses, this chip, including the GPU, is likely only drawing 10-15W. Now let me run Cinebench R23 which is a native app, not running through Rosetta, and you’ll see something amazing. I’m going to throw up a graph here showing a comparison to a desktop Ryzen 3600X, a 6 core 12 thread CPU that, for context, draws 85W just from the CPU alone. Notice anything? The laptop CPU that is the M1, heck its basically a modified ipad CPU, is 15% faster than the desktop Ryzen CPU. Sure, in all core workloads the Ryzen chip is still 17% faster, but that’s thanks to Apples chip design choice. If you compare to AMD’s 3300X, their 4 core 8 thread chip, the M1 is still 15% faster in single threaded loads, but squeezes 16% faster using all cores too.

The reason for that discrepancy is one of the benefits of the M1 using ARM’s base designs. ARM offers a thing called big.LITTLE, and means you can pair slower, lower power cores with higher power higher performance cores all on the same chip. The slower low power cores take care of running the background tasks and basic stuff, while the high power cores turn off until you want to do something intensive. That helps give this chip incredible efficiency in it’s laptop versions, and how it helps extend its battery life beyond anything Intel can currently offer. Apple use 4 ‘efficiency’ cores, and 4 ‘high power’ cores, which is why it’s all core performance doesn’t even match a 6 core desktop, from my testing it seems like the lower power cores only account for 1-1.5 ‘big cores’ worth of performance.

In the real world, this is plenty fast enough to do any basic task, and even have an excellent experience when editing videos in Final Cut, or hell even editing in Premiere is still decent. Power users should still probably stick with Intel for now, but if you only occasionally do intensive tasks on your machine an M1 based device seems like a great option. The only thing is, this is definitely a first generation device, and you will be paying the “early adopter price”. Rosetta works well 99% of the time, but every now and again you might run into instability, or issues with certain features – often ones coded to make use of an x86 instruction that isn’t easily translatable – that will flat out not work. I also had a strange issue where the display would start flickering badly. I tried updating the OS and this happened. I had to hold the power button down to turn it off, then when I booted again it was fixed.

For me, as a PC nerd, this is interesting – but I’d never buy one. The performance per watt this offers is insane for sure, but I don’t need a laptop CPU. And even when the 16, 32 or 64 core versions of this turn up, I have an extreme dislike of Apple’s closed off walled garden ecosystem and would rather have slower performance but a PC I feel I actually own and control. If I want a laptop, it’d be a gaming machine to game and edit from on the go, not a thin and light which rules out any Apple device, M1 or not. And the lack of dedicated graphics, or failing that external GPU support through it’s Thunderbolt ports are the final nail in the coffin for me, at least for the M1 as is.