Mac mini speed-up

[Manhattan Beach Little League]

This issue is indirectly related to my previous post about screen and file sharing. I am running a job on a late 2012 headless i5 Mac mini that takes about a week (no, it’s not bitcoin related). Thinking of getting a refurb M1 Mac mini as a speed-up. The code is nothing special, just nested loops with with a bunch of if-then-elses and a few floating point calculations. Assuming that I don’t do anything fancy like using threading or parallelizing the code, do you have any opinions on the improvements that I can expect? Just glancing at https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks , it looks as I can get a 4x speed-up from a simple port. I can probably improve things more by porting from Python or parallelizing, but for now, just wondering about whether I should buy something like this

https://www.backmarket.com/en-us/p/mac-mini-november-2020-m1-32-ghz-ssd-256-gb-8gb/bc0a6fc5-a4bc-48a8-8e92-2e5127fc8da0#l=11

or this

https://www.apple.com/shop/product/FGNR3LL/A/refurbished-mac-mini-apple-m1-chip-with-8%E2%80%91core-cpu-and-8%E2%80%91core-gpu?fnode=48176108844a48e27556617e174385d4cac8a6e708b25378f9e0f2a889acccd735adda2f37030e00158eac5d8a75ad63c31ec8fe5d5550b44b3f1c96b1212898e190e71a1f955ab1c1de6e837622c2ba

Dennis Kane

[Allison Sheridan]

I don’t think it’s possible for us to give you a speed up approximation, but it will be extraordinary. Even just going from a modern Intel machine to an M1 is a huge leap, you’re going ahead by more than a decade as well.

The M1s are all the same speed so you won’t see a difference from that. I wouldn’t bother getting a lot of RAM, but 256GB of disk is really small. Remember you can’t EVER upgrade the RAM or disk because it’s a System on a Chip (SoC). I’d get 512 as a minimum and not spend for more than 16GB.

 Allison

On Mar 31, 2023, at 11:05 AM, Manhattan Beach Little League <dennisj...@gmail.com> wrote:



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[Dennis De Mars]

We had a Mac Mini for our office that was probably around that model (2012 i5) and it was so dog slow everybody including me thought there was something wrong with it. I even tried wiping it and reinstalling the OS.

The M1 Mac Minis on the other hand, are fine. (They can do Xcode builds multiple times faster than my “trash can” Mac Pro).

I’d say the model you are looking at is a little light on RAM; I would try to get 16GB and as Allison says a little bigger internal disk would be nice; if you can’t afford that, then even the model you are looking at is going to be a big improvement on the Mac Mini you are using now.

- Dennis D.

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[Mario Obejas]

TL;DR: If you can recompile your code to be Apple Silicon native, the speed up could be dramatic.

Details:

Here's real world experience comparing a 10+ year old older Intel box with an M2 Pro (16 GPU core).

Up until March of this year, my older son has been using a Hackintosh I created back in 2009(!) - mostly for video editing, renders, and Photoshop (DaVinci Resolv, Photoshop), as well as dual boot. The specs were pretty good for their time, you can compare them to your 2012 i5 Mac mini:

Intel i7 870 3.2GHz CPU, 32GB 12800 DDR3 RAM

We bought a Mac Mini with the M2 Pro, 16GB Ram, 512GB SSD, ported everything over.

It's not a straight OS compare: the Hackintosh is limited to Catalina; the M2 Pro Mac Mini runs latest Ventura.

Davinci renders that used to take two hours now take 10 minutes.

Note: that's comparing DaVinci 15 Intel native with DaVinci 18 Apple Silicon native.

Some Photoshop mask scripts were so instantaneous, he didn't think they had worked because previously there were formerly display changes as the mask applied. But no, they were just that fast.

Suggestions:
Get the 512 SDD minimuum, as Apple's stock of 256GB SSDs are slower.
Get at least 16GB RAM. You only get one chance to specify it. For our video rendering, I would get at least 24GB if I had to do it again.

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