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
Testing Single Core Performance of Apple M1 Chip Using Cinebench R23
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
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
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.
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