I received my 2020 mac mini today (US$ 699). Since this is the first product with Apple M1 chip CPU, I am curious to find out its performance. I ran some tests using benchmark apps including Blackmagic and Cinebench.

This Apple M1 chip is 8 cores and 8 threads. FYI, Apple said it has 25000 concurrent threads, it means the CPU can execute 25k jobs at the same time. Its like a kitchen with 8 chefs working on 25k orders. It doesn’t mean there are 25k chefs in the kitchen.

Here are the specification of this CPU (Source):

• 8-core CPU with 4 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores
• 8-core GPU (A nVidia GPU such as the one in GeForce RTX 2060 has 1920 cores)
• 16-core Neural Engine

Testing Multi Core Performance of Apple M1 Chip Using Cinebench R23

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Testing Single Core Performance of Apple M1 Chip Using Cinebench R23

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Testing CPU and GPU Performance of Apple M1 Chip Using GeekBench 5

Results:

• CPU: Single-Core Score: 1746; Multi-Core Score: 7192; Detail Report
• GPU: OpenCL Score: 18288; Detail Report

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Testing Machine Learning Performance Using MLBenchy

Here is the result:

InceptionV3 Run Time: 1434ms
Nudity Run Time: 393ms
Resnet50  Run Time:1364ms
Car Recognition  Run Time:473ms
GoogleNetPlace  Run Time:410ms
GenderNet Run Time: 597ms
TinyYolo Run Time: 806ms

InceptionV3 Run Time: 121ms
Nudity Run Time: 83ms
Resnet50  Run Time:72ms
Car Recognition  Run Time:114ms
GoogleNetPlace  Run Time:111ms
GenderNet Run Time: 86ms
TinyYolo Run Time: 146ms

InceptionV3 Run Time: 91ms
Nudity Run Time: 76ms
Resnet50  Run Time:136ms
Car Recognition  Run Time:72ms
GoogleNetPlace  Run Time:147ms
GenderNet Run Time: 87ms
TinyYolo Run Time: 72ms


 
Done running the 3 iterations of the benchmark 

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And finally, if you are curious about the SSD performance of the mac mini…

Testing Disk Performance of Mac Mini SSD Using Blackmagic Speed Test

I am quite surprise about its overall performance. The single core performance of Apple M1 chip is better than Intel i9-9880 and i7-1165. It will be quite useful if I need to perform some non-parallel computations. The multiple core performance of Apple M1 is quite impressive too. If you take a look to the result, you will notice that most of the CPUs that have better scores have more cores and threads. I really don’t expect a $700 computer that can beat the CPU that costs a thousand dollars or more.