Sure, but (see my other comment in this thread): Max and Pro chips differ in GPU not CPU, and this benchmark says nothing about GPU performance.
Its not just a little faster than the #2; looking at ~15-20% uplifts in both single and multi compared to the previous kings. The previous production single core #1 was ~3100; Apple skipped over most of the 3000s right into the 4000s.
I wonder if their rules are “we only announce benchmarks we’ve done ourselves”? Coupled with “well we need some readers today and our MacBook order hasn’t arrived”
The linked M4 Max benchmark is from after the article was published, so I don’t think this thread demonstrates fair criticism.
As long as it has enough RAM, that seems like a sound idea.
I actually got the M1 MacBook Air to replace an old Linux netbook that was dying (and also needed the walled garden for a project). I think that the M1 would still be enough for my daily tasks away from the desktop for quite a few years... except that I got the 8 GB version, which in hindsight was a pretty big mistake, assuming the rest of the hardware and software will have decent longevity.
Now I'm looking for remote development environments, something I could maybe run on my homelab and remote into, or maybe just running development containers on them.
If I picked up a new Mini or MacBook today, I'm reasonably confident it, too, would last me five years or more.
I'm not sure that quite follows. This benchmark is with the fastest (of 3) CPU options for the Mini. With 64GB of memory and 1 TB storage (to make a fair comparison with the Studio M2 Ultra), you're looking at a $2500 machine. We're not talking about the base $600 config here.
Granted, that's a lot less than the $4000 starting price of an M2 Ultra machine, but it's also 18 months later, and you don't get the GPU performance of an Ultra (see below).
> So the new Mini is faster than all existing Macs (at least on multicore Geekbench)
That's another thing: This only measures CPU performance.
The difference between "Max" chips and "Pro" chips lies in the GPU, not the CPU. The CPU core counts for Pro and Max are the same, but the Max has 2x as many GPU cores. ("Ultra" chips are basically two "Max" dies on one chip)
As you might expect, M2 Max and Pro have near-identical multi-core geekbench scores, but the Geekbench Metal score for the M2 Max is 80% higher than the M2 Pro (and M2 Ultra is about 2.7x the M2 Pro).
A 10-core M4 (w/ 10 GPU cores) scores about 58,000 on Metal (https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/compute/3039631), so the Mac Mini with 14-core M4 Pro (w/ 20 GPU cores) should be expected to score around 116,000 on Metal.
That's almost exactly the same GPU performance as a Studio M2 Max (which would have cost you $2600 last year with 64GB memory and 1TB storage)... If you paid $4000 for the M2 Ultra last year, you would still have comfortably 2x the performance of today's $2500 Mac Mini, and nearly the same multi-core CPU performance.
> Of course, it will soon be surpassed by the M4 Max chip with a 16-core CPU, but no results are available for that chip as of writing.
Also how on earth does a newer machine being fast "throw a wrench" in the performance profile of an existing machine?
This sounds like retroactive rationalization of not being able to get a top of the line machine.
Base Freq Chip
--------- ----
2.4GHz EPYC 9654
4.7GHz Ryzen 7950X
Geekbench Single Core - Score
-----------------------------
1,827 EPYC 9654
2,986 Ryzen 7950X
--
Compare this to a multithreaded benchmark that does scale to all of the cores and you'll find the higher core count CPUs are able to push significantly higher scores despite the single thread difference e.g. https://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html has them at 62,711 vs 117,317 in the opposite ranking direction. That should feel about right, otherwise AMD would only make the 16 core high frequency CPUs instead of 128 core low frequency monsters.
That's not to say the Geekbench score is bad or useless. It represents a specific type of workload... just not "peak multi core performance". It's more indicative of "mixed workload performance", where the extra 2x cores on the Ultra are more apparently going to be irrelevant.
But why? Wouldn’t total score be approximately corecount*corescore? Of course it’s not exactly that because not all cores run full speed at the same time, but how are the cores weighted that 16 cores are better than 96 cores with half the speed each?
For some reason the Epyc is radically faster for "Ray Tracer" and "Horizon Detection" but worse for "PDF Renderer" and "Background Blur"
It wouldn't surprise me if PDF renderer and background blur were fast enough tasks that spinning up 96 threads to split rendering across all those cores was a waste of time compared to how fast the actual task was to complete. It was akin to trying to hammer in 50 nails by getting 50 people and handing out 50 hammers and assigning each person one nail, then telling them "okay, start!", then inspecting everyone's work afterwards; at some point, it's faster just to break it into two or three tasks.
I ended up using something else to generate the load I needed, but I can’t remember exactly what. I think it might have been a Monero benchmarking tool?
Until the next Max that goes beyond Ultra!
https://browser.geekbench.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=mac16%...
The news here is that the Pro isn’t just better than the previous Pro, it’s better than the previous Max and the previous Ultra. That’s impressive even if it’s expected that it will be better than the previous Pro.
i do wonder how much difference cooling does, and the temps and noise of that new mini
Actually, I don’t know how like an M3 pro or better compares with a ryzen 5600 and rtx 3060, I assume much better cpu performanc and similar GPU performance?