Apple Mac Mini M1

[kitekrazy]

22 minutes ago, abacab said:

So lets get things straight! If we go out and buy an M1 Mac Mini, we get free booze, correct?

and it will leave the other booze in the dust

[kitekrazy]

4 hours ago, Philip G Hunt said:

...not since CbB released their last update 😂

and it being a free product........this use to be a nasty place in the old Sonar days with the fanboys

[Jim Roseberry]

One last post... and everyone can draw their own conclusion.

 

Here's a screenshot of the Ryzen 5950x running the full stress-test project... still set to 96k using a 32-sample ASIO buffer size.

With all those large Kontakt libraries loaded, Superior Drummer 3, and two simultaneous instances of Helix Native (one being monitored in realtime with the green Z button enabled for lowest possible latency), CPU use was right about 35%.

I can start the transport and play Helix Native (1ms total round-trip latency)... and play with absolutely zero glitches.

 

 

I'll repeat that comparing a $800 M1 Mac Mini to a full-bore workstation running a 5950x CPU ($800 CPU) isn't a fair comparison.

To run the above project (without glitches), the M1 Mac Mini had to be bumped up to a 256-sample buffer size.

 

Overall, I thought the M1 Mac Mini performed extremely well... and especially for what it is (small form-factor, low cost).

Blows a typical $800 off-the-shelf laptop out of the water.

I'm used to running a machine where I can make it exactly what I want... with lots of speed and storage space.

For the M1 Mac Mini to work for someone like me, it would need a Thunderbolt dock and multiple external NVMe/SATA drives.

At that point, you've got a fair amount invested... (IMO) trying to make it something it was never designed to be.

I wish that Apple would just allow the user the choice of 32 or 64GB RAM. 

I wish end users could add a couple internal M.2 NVMe SSDs.

More RAM, more drives, more ports...

If the M1 Mac Mini had 64GB RAM, with its current RAM scheme it would feel almost limitless.

The M1 Mac Mini squeezes a lot out of 16GB RAM (using RAM compression, caching, etc).

When pushing the M1 Mac Mini to the point where "RAM Pressure" was getting high, I could get it to start hitting the VM Swapfile pretty heavily.

What's odd is that after sitting for a while (with the same load still running), "RAM Pressure" seems to normalize (reduce to where it's back into the green).

If you're trying to run large projects, waiting for RAM to normalize or for RAM compression to be fully used/optimized isn't ideal.

To Hugh's point, the M1 Mac Mini squeezes a LOT out of 16GB RAM.

It's frustrating if you're approaching it as a "power-user"... and expecting that level of performance/flexibility.

If you have reasonable expectations, the M1 Mac Mini is a slick, elegant, small-form-factor machine.