This M1 Mac mini is insane

stonevibe

I just made my old FireWIre Mackie Onyx mixer put 16 channels into the M1 Mac mini with insanely low latency.

Using an FW 400 to 800 adapter then via another FW to Thunderbolt adapter, and into a Thunderbolt to USB-C adapter.


Was sure it would fail, but no it loves it!

This is the base model and it just keeps amazing me at how much it can handle. Literally, all my old plugins work in Logic Pro X and it won't crap out on track count.

cairobill

I stopped flailing about with MacBook Pro's and made the jump to a pimped out 2018 Mac mini (with 32GB RAM and i7). The thing doesn't blink even under the heaviest of loads - changed my life  

My bandmate has an M1 and has similar good things to say about his as well

stonevibe

I get the feeling these Apple SIlicon machines could get insanely powerful, as I only have the base model Mac mini version and it outperforms my Mac Pro tower!

spark240

Yeah I can't wait for Studio One and all the Plug ins to be compatible....

danishbacon

I did the same and sold my i9 MPB. I’m impressed. 

JezWynd

Why is it that the top of the range MBPs still feature Intel chips?

danishbacon

JezWynd said:

Why is it that the top of the range MBPs still feature Intel chips?

They’ve still not released a top of the range m powered mpb. The £600 mini outperformed my £3k i9 on a lot of tasks. It’s a significant leap. Wish focusrite would sort themselves out and fix TB support. 

JezWynd

danishbacon said:

JezWynd said:

Why is it that the top of the range MBPs still feature Intel chips?

They’ve still not released a top of the range m powered mpb. The £600 mini outperformed my £3k i9 on a lot of tasks. It’s a significant leap. Wish focusrite would sort themselves out and fix TB support. 

Are there any notable tasks that the Intel chips still out perform the M1 chip? I see in the Mac Mini range, the top of the line is an i7 chip which can be configured with 64Gb of RAM. The Mac M1 machine tops out at 16Gb RAM. This leads me to think that for certain tasks  (multi layered video?) the Intel chips still have an edge at present.

FATNinja

stonevibe said:

I just made my old FireWIre Mackie Onyx mixer put 16 channels into the M1 Mac mini with insanely low latency.

Using an FW 400 to 800 adapter then via another FW to Thunderbolt adapter, and into a Thunderbolt to USB-C adapter."


Was sure it would fail, but no it loves it!

This is the base model and it just keeps amazing me at how much it can handle. Literally, all my old plugins work in Logic Pro X and it won't crap out on track count.

Was that the 1640i desk? 
I have one but didn't want to chance it not working as its "officially unsupported"
Otherwise the little new macs look great, especially with the m2 (or m1x.depensing what they call it) chip coming out soon 

spark240

JezWynd said:

danishbacon said:

JezWynd said:

Why is it that the top of the range MBPs still feature Intel chips?

They’ve still not released a top of the range m powered mpb. The £600 mini outperformed my £3k i9 on a lot of tasks. It’s a significant leap. Wish focusrite would sort themselves out and fix TB support. 

Are there any notable tasks that the Intel chips still out perform the M1 chip? I see in the Mac Mini range, the top of the line is an i7 chip which can be configured with 64Gb of RAM. The Mac M1 machine tops out at 16Gb RAM. This leads me to think that for certain tasks  (multi layered video?) the Intel chips still have an edge at present.

Some guy did a vid on the 16G mini with Hi res video...he claimed it fell over all the time, but most of it was due tie the video codec he was using..

digitalscream

JezWynd said:

danishbacon said:

JezWynd said:

Why is it that the top of the range MBPs still feature Intel chips?

They’ve still not released a top of the range m powered mpb. The £600 mini outperformed my £3k i9 on a lot of tasks. It’s a significant leap. Wish focusrite would sort themselves out and fix TB support. 

Are there any notable tasks that the Intel chips still out perform the M1 chip? I see in the Mac Mini range, the top of the line is an i7 chip which can be configured with 64Gb of RAM. The Mac M1 machine tops out at 16Gb RAM. This leads me to think that for certain tasks  (multi layered video?) the Intel chips still have an edge at present.

In terms of CPU-bound tasks, I don't think so (unless you're talking about massively parallel stuff, think 16 threads or above - and then you're still talking about AMD CPUs being ahead, not Intel). And, of course, there's the memory issue. The newer AMD CPUs still outperform it in most things, though (eg Ryzen 5600X).

There's still the question of longevity in my mind; the M1 relies an awful lot on its dedicated hardware encoders for a lot of stuff now, particularly video encoding. That's great while the codecs and algorithms it supports are current, but in three or four years time? No idea.

In terms of GPU-heavy tasks, it seems that it still gets kerb-stomped by a GTX 970. With that said, you can't actually buy any GPUs at the moment, so the relevance of that is up to you

As a laptop chip, the M1 seems to be king of the hill at the moment. When you up the power and thermal envelopes, though, it can't really keep up.

My suspicion is that a lot of the speed advantages it enjoys are down to the memory tech; the baked-in RAM has the disadvantage of being non-upgradeable, but it does allow ridiculously low-latency access which the CPU seems to love. If that's true, it's unlikely we'll ever see slotted memory on M1-based Macs, because there would be an inherent performance drop in doing so.

Danny1969

The biggest improvement for me comes from the RISC design in terms of non having a billion transistors doing nothing most of the time but  consuming a quiescent current and creating heat / wasting power. This is better for the battery in the Macbook, the motherboard and the environment. 

In terms of track count / plugins etc even reasonably old Intel Macs can generally handle more tracks and plugins than 90% of home users would ever use,  so is it really much of an advantage unless you work in film scoring or are into crazy amounts of VI's. Most peoples complaints with track count tend to come when they are using PC's that haven't been set up for audio work ... leading to comments like you need an i7 and 8Gb of ram to do anything when we were all recording 32 tracks of audio on P4 chips with 1Gb ram 15 years ago. Plugin's can sure use a lot of resources but the process of actual tracking audio is so CPU light it's not really an issue. 

Sadly it's been confirmed some of the very poor design flaws in the touchbar models are in the M1 Macbook's, BL driver voltage on adjacent pin to CPU data and USBC mux chip just as flakey. Shame, they used to make such good laptops. 

octatonic

JezWynd said:

Why is it that the top of the range MBPs still feature Intel chips?

Because it is new tech.

And it is more dramatic to do this like this- release a 'low spec' machine that blows the equivalent Intel computers out of the water with the promise of 'more to come' with the pro level machines.

I just returned an M1 13" MBP, not because it wasn't an amazing machine- it is, but the screen size is just too small for me.
I'll get the 16" when it is released.

I can't wait to see the M-series Mac Pro tower too.