Discussion Apple Silicon SoC thread

Eug · Nov 10, 2020

M1
5 nm
Unified memory architecture - LP-DDR4
16 billion transistors

8-core CPU

4 high-performance cores
192 KB instruction cache
128 KB data cache
Shared 12 MB L2 cache

4 high-efficiency cores
128 KB instruction cache
64 KB data cache
Shared 4 MB L2 cache
(Apple claims the 4 high-effiency cores alone perform like a dual-core Intel MacBook Air)

8-core iGPU (but there is a 7-core variant, likely with one inactive core)
128 execution units
Up to 24576 concurrent threads
2.6 Teraflops
82 Gigatexels/s
41 gigapixels/s

16-core neural engine
Secure Enclave
USB 4

Products:
$999 ($899 edu) 13" MacBook Air (fanless) - 18 hour video playback battery life
$699 Mac mini (with fan)
$1299 ($1199 edu) 13" MacBook Pro (with fan) - 20 hour video playback battery life

Memory options 8 GB and 16 GB. No 32 GB option (unless you go Intel).

It should be noted that the M1 chip in these three Macs is the same (aside from GPU core number). Basically, Apple is taking the same approach which these chips as they do the iPhones and iPads. Just one SKU (excluding the X variants), which is the same across all iDevices (aside from maybe slight clock speed differences occasionally).

EDIT:

M1 Pro 8-core CPU (6+2), 14-core GPU
M1 Pro 10-core CPU (8+2), 14-core GPU
M1 Pro 10-core CPU (8+2), 16-core GPU
M1 Max 10-core CPU (8+2), 24-core GPU
M1 Max 10-core CPU (8+2), 32-core GPU

M1 Pro and M1 Max discussion here:

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M1 Ultra discussion here:

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M2 discussion here:

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Second Generation 5 nm
Unified memory architecture - LPDDR5, up to 24 GB and 100 GB/s
20 billion transistors

8-core CPU

4 high-performance cores
192 KB instruction cache
128 KB data cache
Shared 16 MB L2 cache

4 high-efficiency cores
128 KB instruction cache
64 KB data cache
Shared 4 MB L2 cache

10-core iGPU (but there is an 8-core variant)
3.6 Teraflops

16-core neural engine
Secure Enclave
USB 4

Hardware acceleration for 8K h.264, h.264, ProRes

M3 Family discussion here:

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M4 Family discussion here:

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Gideon · Nov 7, 2024

FlameTail said:
M4 Max vs Strix Halo
546 GB/s vs 273 GB/s

STH has basically half the bandwidth of M4 Max.

Yes, Strix Halo has exactly the same bandwidth as the M4 Pro has.

Eug · Nov 8, 2024

Mac mini SSD is removable, like the Mac Studio (ie. not user serviceable).

poke01 · Nov 8, 2024

Eug said:
Mac mini SSD is removable, like the Mac Studio (ie. not user serviceable).

OH thank you. Getting it now /s

poke01 · Nov 8, 2024

Nah but seriously this is great. Do laptops next Apple. SSDs should not be soldered

poke01 · Nov 8, 2024

Eug said:
Mac mini SSD is removable, like the Mac Studio (ie. not user serviceable).

Where’d you find this btw?

Eug · Nov 8, 2024

poke01 said:
Where’d you find this btw?

Teardown pix have been posted elsewhere.

On the chip it says SDMVGKLK2 128G.

poke01 said:
OH thank you. Getting it now /s

I'm getting mine next week. It was last seen in ShenZhen on its way here to Canada.

poke01 said:
Nah but seriously this is great. Do laptops next Apple. SSDs should not be soldered

Indeed. Just last month, a friend's 2015 MacBook Air SSD was no longer detectable. Nothing would revive it, and the Apple Store said it was toast. I happened to have an OEM 128 GB Apple drive lying around (which is a non-standard size and pinout, and which is AHCI) so I mailed it to him, and now the machine is back up and running again.

However, if the Mac Studio is any indication, while it will be physically easy to replace the drive, getting it to actually work in the M4 Mac mini is a whole other matter.

The good news is somehow dosdude1 has already managed to secure the parts and will upgrade his M4 Mac mini up to 2 TB, and says he will release a how-to video of the process.

Doug S · Nov 8, 2024

Eug said:
Mac mini SSD is removable, like the Mac Studio (ie. not user serviceable).

It isn't really an SSD though, it is raw NAND plus a bridge chip. No controller, because that's the Apple Silicon SoC. Apple is the only one who sells these, at least as far as I know.

They ARE user serviceable, I mean unless you define a Mini or Studio as being too difficult to open and service yourself. There were some claims that Apple prevents you from swapping them around, but that was written by someone who doesn't understand what he was dealing with. They are raw NAND encrypted with a key lives that in the secure enclave of the Mac it came from. So it can't be read on another Mac, ever (unless there's a way to get it to export that key and import it on another Mac?) But you could presumably format it and use it on another Mac, or install one you buy from Apple and reinstall macOS on it or whatever.

Eug · Nov 8, 2024

Doug S said:
It isn't really an SSD though, it is raw NAND plus a bridge chip. No controller, because that's the Apple Silicon SoC. Apple is the only one who sells these, at least as far as I know.

Yes but Apple actually calls it SSD in the service manual.

They ARE user serviceable, I mean unless you define a Mini or Studio as being too difficult to open and service yourself. There were some claims that Apple prevents you from swapping them around, but that was written by someone who doesn't understand what he was dealing with. They are raw NAND encrypted with a key lives that in the secure enclave of the Mac it came from. So it can't be read on another Mac, ever (unless there's a way to get it to export that key and import it on another Mac?) But you could presumably format it and use it on another Mac, or install one you buy from Apple and reinstall macOS on it or whatever.

Apparently you could only ever order the same size SSD your machine had originally. And it takes a specific pairing procedure for it to work apparently. Apple just says you must be familiar with the technical procedures (paraphrasing). I’d reread the report description and I hope it’s as easy as you make it sound, but I think I’ll just wait for dosdude’s instructional video instead.

BTW, I ordered the M4 Mac mini with 24 GB and 512 GB plus 10 GbE, and will use an external 4 TB USB 4 SSD. UPS says the Mac arrives Monday. Yay!

SSD enclosure ordered but waiting for Black Friday sale to purchase SSD. Not sure if to buy a hot running DRAM-endowed Samsung 990 Pro or WD SN850X, or else a cooler DRAM-less Samsung 990 EVO Plus that won’t even have HMB support in that enclosure. Enclosure built like a giant heat sink though, so it should be able to accommodate the extra heat from a 990 Pro.

Gideon · Nov 8, 2024

I thought it would be "fun" to get some perspective of the M4 Mac Mini performance against windows mini-PCs.

As there are no decent Snapdragon variants (AFAIK) I picked one of the best reviewed smaller x86 mini-pcs out there currently, the Beelink SER9.

(it's nearly the same size too!)

Some reviews: here and here.

They are wildy different machines, but the Beelink is the closest thing to the Mini on the x86 side in eatureset in *roughly* the same price bracket (they are still wildly different)

Some notes about the SER9:

It is also overall considered very-quiet and can sustain it's peak performance.
It has no thunderbolt but OK I/O (still worse than the mini)
It has 2x PCIE4.0 SSD slots but soldered memory
It comes with 2.5GbE Ethernet port (which is decent for base, but not upgradable)

I'll handycap the comparison to base model. Upgraded M4 would trounce SER9 in every way but the costs quickly skyrocket. Might be slightly unfair for the M4 when US pricing is taken into account, but

Specifications:

Name

Dimensions

Weight

Noise (full load)

Power (full load, sustained, wall)

Base RAM / storage

I/O (USB)

SoC Specs

Beelink SER9

13.6 x 13.6 x 5.0 cm [1]

0.82 kg [1]

40db [2]

78W [2]

32GB / 1TB

1x 40 Gbps USB-C 4.0
1x 10 Gbps USB-C 3.2
2x 10 Gbps USB-A 3.2
2x 5 Gbps USB-A 2.0

4 + 8 core CPU / 12CU GPU

M4 mini (base)

12.7 x 12.7 x 5.0 cm

0.67 kg

30db

50W ? *

16GB / 256GB
(24 GB/ 512GB) **

2x 10 Gbps USB-C 3.2
3x 40 Gbps USB-C 4.0 / TB4

4 + 6 core CPU / 10 core GPU

[1] Beelink dimensions and weight from here
[2] Beelink noise and peak power from here (in a 34db noise floor office)

* extrapolated from apple M2 Pro numbers compared to Handbrake average CPU Power consumption
** In US the price difference is such that you can get a 24GB + 512MB version of the mini for the same price, here in EU the beelink is more competitive with about the same price as the 16GB + 512GB model.

Performance

Here I really wish someone would do a 1-1 comparisn as wildly different benches have been used between reviews. However some comparison is still possible:

Name	Cinebench R23	Cinebench 2024	GB6 CPU	GB6 GPU	GB6 AI
Beelink SER9	2048 ST 23234 MT	115 ST 1200 MT **	2850 - 2900 ST 14900 - 15500 MT	Vulkan: 49970 - 51100	OpenVINO (source): ST: 5358 HP: 5441 Quantized : 13802
M4 mini (base)	2159 ST (+ 5%) 13471 MT (- 72%) *	172 ST (+ 49%) 960 MT (- 25%)	3750 - 3850 ST (+ 30-33%) 14900 - 15000 MT (- 5- 0%)	Metal: 55800 - 57100 (+ 9 -14%)	Neural Engine: (source) ST: 4745, HP: 36762 Quantized: 51695 GPU: (source) ST: 8479, HP: 10475 Quantized: 9439

* it was an iMac actually but there is also a MT score from M4 Mini that's similar (no ST though)
** this is from laptop reviews of notebookcheck.com MT for the SER9 could probably be 5-10% better still

Geekbench CPU: 1, 2
Geekbencg GPU list1, list2

The Cinebench results look really wierd, but this correlates over multiple runs. It looks like R23 is rather badyl optimized for ARM while 2024 is an outlier on the ST part.
M4 is 49% faster in 2024 ST and 25% slower in MT. For R23 it's 70% slower in MT and only 5% ahead in ST. The R23 ST result is certainly too god for Zen 5 but the 2024 50% deficit also seems above the norm

Some more tests:

Handbrake (MP4 Ecode, FAST 1080P30) is about equal (based on Asus laptop and iMac scores) with a probable small edge to the Beelink (as Asus Zenbook 16 has very conservative power limits)

Performance Summary

So SER9 vs baseline M4 mini has:

30% worse ST performance
slightly better MT performance in embarasingly parallel (24T) tasks
about the same MT performance in less parallel MT workloads (e.g. SW encoding, compiling)
Comparable GPU Compute performance (only one test though)
Overall slightly worse I/O and much worse media engine (if i understand correctly)

That while consuming about the same power as M4 Pro (in MT tests) and being about the same price as the 512GB / 24GB model in the US (offering more storage and RAM though).
Now there are obviously also many 200-400$ x86 mini pc's that still perform relatively well, but they lack even more in most of these metrics.

Bottom Line

The M4 lineup truly is a huge step up. The M2 and M3 generations were hamstrung by the 8GB memory (thus not really price competitive with 512GB SSD and 16GB ram) and were "only" about 20% faster in ST while being 20% slower in MT than the x86 competition.

Now I'm really looking forward to comparing Strix Halo to M4 Pro. It should be a slightly better matched competitor competitor than Strix is to M4. Though I'm afraid there will only be a very small selection of devices to compare

poke01 · Nov 8, 2024

Gideon said:
The Cinebench results look really wierd, but this correlates over multiple runs. It looks like R23 is rather badyl optimized for ARM while 2024 is an outlier on the ST part.
M4 is 49% faster in 2024 ST and 25% slower in MT. For R23 it's 70% slower in MT and only 5% ahead in ST. The R23 ST result is certainly too god for Zen 5 but the 2024 50% deficit also seems above the norm

M4 also perfroms well in blender CPU

mvprod123 · Nov 8, 2024

Binned 32-core M4 Max GPU delivers a better Blender score than unbinned 40-core M3 Max GPU

Gideon · Nov 8, 2024

poke01 said:
M4 also perfroms well in blender CPU

Yeah, but that's the one place HX 370 shines in as well (the CPU part)

SoC	Score	Number of Benchmarks
Apple M4 Pro (GPU - 20 cores)	2530.47	6
Apple M4 (GPU - 10 cores)	1071.01	9
Apple M4 Pro	398.94	7
Apple M4	230.94	9
AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370	281.07	17
Intel Core Ultra 9 288V	135.3	2

Poor Lunar Lake though.

Anyway nobody really cross-shops these things. I just thought it would be an interesting HW comparison.

Nobody in Mac ecosystem is going to buy a x86 machine. The other way around it happens much more frequently, but there are caveats and dealbreakers there as well.

poke01 · Nov 8, 2024

Gideon said:
this is from laptop reviews of notebookcheck.com MT for the SER9 could probably be 5-10% better still

The HX 370 can up to 1275 likely at 65w PPT.

Gideon said:
it was an iMac actually but there is also a MT score from M4 Mini that's similar (no ST though)

M4 can go a bit higher in MT. Probably depends on SSD speed.

Beelink SER9 Mini-PC mit AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 im Test

AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 alias Strix Point gibt es nun erstmals im Mini-PC, dem SER9 von Beelink. Das Gesamtpaket ist im Test richtig gut!

www.computerbase.de

edit: added source

Bottom line is at around 30 watts, the base 10c/10t M4 matches the HX 370 12c/24t in Cinebench MT and its proved with real world tests like Handbrake MP4 test. We have different approaches and thats great for us as consumers!

mvprod123 · Nov 8, 2024

mvprod123 · Nov 8, 2024

RIP x86

poke01 · Nov 8, 2024

mvprod123 said:
RIP x86

until 2026 😛

FlameTail · Nov 8, 2024

mvprod123 said:
RIP x86

View attachment 111249 View attachment 111250

RIP everyone basically. Intel, AMD, Arm Cortex, Qualcomm Oryon.....

In the short term (next ~2 years), I don't think anyone can catch up to Apple's lead in single core performance and performance-per-watt.

(I do think Oryon G3 might have a small chance, but I am not going to bet on it).

mvprod123 · Nov 8, 2024

M4 Max GPU has nearly the same in rendering perf as RTX4080 laptop
M4 Pro GPU is faster tnan M2 Ultra and 4060 laptop in rendering

mvprod123 · Nov 8, 2024

Apple wasn't lying about RT improvements. I am pleasantly surprised by how well Apple implemented its RT. It's already better than Intel and AMD and probably close to Nvidia's level. Some of the patent work of Imagination and Apple has done a good job.

Henry swagger · Nov 8, 2024

Apple teaching intel and amd how deliver performance and efficiency.. apple is next level in core design

FlameTail · Nov 8, 2024

Geekerwan mentioned something interesting: the M4 Max is finally capable saturating the cooling system of the Macbook Pro 16".

I think the next Macbook Pro with M5 chips will have a redesign. OLED displays, thinner design and new cooling system.

Meteor Late · Nov 8, 2024

poke01 said:
until 2026 😛

Yeah, thing is though, Apple has a yearly cadence, while AMD is closer to a two year cadence than a one year cadence. Intel who knows because they tend to refresh the shit out of their architectures, so it doesn't really count as a yearly cadence.
So we are looking, at the very least, at Apple M5 and variants vs Zen 6, and there could be a short period between Zen 6 and Apple M6, just like what happened this year. I expect the gap to be somewhat reduced between M5 and Zen 6, as I expect around a more conservative 10% bump in ST for Apple M5, but who knows.

Meteor Late · Nov 8, 2024

The difference is just so big, AMD and Intel are using wayy more power in ST on Desktop to achieve those frequencies, along with very good binning, when Apple seems to not frequency-bin much, also there is non LPDDR memory helping Desktop chips in Spec, among other factors raising their score a bit.
When you compare against x86 laptop chips, which will be a closer power consumption baseline (though still higher in x86), it's just a bloodbath.

FlameTail · Nov 8, 2024

Meteor Late said:
The difference is just so big, AMD and Intel are using wayy more power in ST on Desktop to achieve those frequencies, along with very good binning, when Apple seems to not frequency-bin much, also there is non LPDDR memory helping Desktop chips in Spec, among other factors raising their score a bit.
When you compare against x86 laptop chips, which will be a closer power consumption baseline (though still higher in x86), it's just a bloodbath.

The consolation for Intel/AMD is that Apple uses their chips only in their own products, which isolates them from the broader market due to the walled garden.

The real bloodbath will begin when other ARM vendors such as Qualcomm and Nvidia bring their next gen ARM cores into the broader PC market.

mvprod123 · Nov 8, 2024

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