2020 Mac Mini or wait for ARM?

[Flyingrockstudios]

Originally Posted by dominicperry

Pros used scissors.

I used to be the technical director at a plant that made 5.25” floppies! They should have listened to me and pressed CD-ROMs instead. They shortly went out of business after that. Maybe that was their 2nd worst decision ever, after passing up business from Microsoft duplicating disks for Windows 95 and instead going with OS/2 from IBM!

[drumzalicious]

To put this thread back on track....I believe we are underselling the power of the M1.

Over on MacRumors there’s a thread where someone is documenting their test runs using Final Cut Pro X render times. As of now a MBP with only 8gb of RAM is outperforming a iMac Pro with 128gb of RAM in exporting 4K and 8k footage. In some tests runs in almost half the time.

When compared to an i9 MBP the results are equally impressive when you include battery life and how quiet the machine runs.

Now I know we are talking Pro Audio here, however 4K and 8K renders in FCP are no joke.

I personally wouldn’t get one for Pro Audio as of yet, however the video industry generally needs computers a tick above audio and if it’s working for them it could be great for us too!

[Righty27]

... on Gearslutz, this is the first user I've seen running Pro Tools on an M1 Mac -

https://www.facebook.com/504959982/p...094034983/?d=n

Here's the thread -

https://www.gearslutz.com/board/new-...20-11-a-6.html

[huzzam]

Originally Posted by Obsidian Dragon

I started back in the days of the Apple IIe adding the 64KB Extended 80-Column Card to the 64KB on the base system for a whopping 128KB RAM. Any one still remember notching 5.25" single sided floppy disks to double the capacity by using the flip side? I still remember using a composite RCA video cable to connect to a TV monitor.

ha we must be the same age... though i had a commodore 64 (so we probably wouldn't have spoken to each other back in those days). i remember dialing into a BBS which bragged about having *8 megs* of downloadable "content" (ok i guess the statute of limitations should be up by now) all online at the same time. That was stored on 12 daisy-chained floppy drives.

I had so much fun programming that thing to play *up to three notes at once*, each in your choice of sine, sawtooth, triangle, or square waves!

[Ru_C]

Originally Posted by Righty27

... on Gearslutz, this is the first user I've seen running Pro Tools on an M1 Mac -

https://www.facebook.com/504959982/p...094034983/?d=n

Here's the thread -

https://www.gearslutz.com/board/new-...20-11-a-6.html

Holy Moly. That’s amazing it’s all working under Rosetta 2 !

[Righty27]

Keen to see how Darryl sees this - it would be great if that tester was a DUC member also though! Does sound pretty amazing - I'm also tracking the Final Cut reviews and even these low-end models appear also to be flying with GPU performance with the native Apple apps.

So, if these Air, MacBook Pro and Mini models are reliable (with an unoptimised DAW) via Rosetta 2 and constrained RAM, many users could probably swap now and take the $$$ saving vs. Intel ... but let's face it, we'll be waiting for the next batch of releases to see what these processors can do when less focused on energy saving and portability.

FWIW, my guess is that the 'M' in 'M1' stands for 'mobile', so we might see 'D' for 'desktop' or 'W' for 'workstation' coming? :)

[Southsidemusic]

Originally Posted by unkJE

Direct quote:

“Apple M1 MacBook Pro Benchmarks Are In And They Are Crazy!”

https://www.pro-tools-expert.com/productio expert-1/apple-m1-macbook-pro-benchmarks-are-in-and-they-are-crazy?mc_cid=82820c612c&mc_eid=070aa82ed2

Link no workey

[Richard901]

Originally Posted by Southsidemusic

Link no workey

https://www.pro-tools-expert.com/pro...they-are-crazy

[paul_g]

Originally Posted by Richard901

https://www.pro-tools-expert.com/pro...they-are-crazy

That's a great tool.



If something isn't on the list, make sure to check the vendors website In looking at all the various products I have, none are compatible with either Big Sur or M1:

UA Luna, UAD, UA Apollo - not compatible
Waves - not compatible
ProTools - Not Compatible
Toontrack - EZ Drummer/Superior Drummer



Do not upgrade to Big Sur... or buy a new Mx chipped Apple just yet.

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by Righty27

Keen to see how Darryl sees this - it would be great if that tester was a DUC member also though! Does sound pretty amazing - I'm also tracking the Final Cut reviews and even these low-end models appear also to be flying with GPU performance with the native Apple apps.

So, if these Air, MacBook Pro and Mini models are reliable (with an unoptimised DAW) via Rosetta 2 and constrained RAM, many users could probably swap now and take the $$$ saving vs. Intel ... but let's face it, we'll be waiting for the next batch of releases to see what these processors can do when less focused on energy saving and portability.

FWIW, my guess is that the 'M' in 'M1' stands for 'mobile', so we might see 'D' for 'desktop' or 'W' for 'workstation' coming? :)

You rang?

No money to be "saved" by users upgrading stuff, that cost is already sunk.

I think Apple is killing it so far with their Arm migration. The amount of impressive stuff they were already doing on iPhone and iPad set a great foundation. And the product points they have started this migration in make a lot of sense. Apple is on fire. And Intel has been and is just struggling in so many places and ways.

Some of the low-level details in this review are very impressive. https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252...pple-m1-tested

I do wish Avid would act more like a leader not a laggard and get out _any_ roadmap/commitment/guidance. But as I said elsewhere the 16GB limit helps dampen demand right now, which is give Avid more time to sort stuff out and I hope they do try to get ahead of the communications curve here.

But as for the hardware memory is memory and 16GB is just not interesting for many of our workloads where we want to run memory hungry VIs, large disk cache etc. And no being Arm based is not going to make a huge difference here --and if anything the unified graphics memory and Rosetta 2 may increase memory demands, and pixie dust like memory compression... current Macs already do that, and do it very impressively, that's not the answer to more memory either.

And you don't know how well Pro Tools will run for you until you load it up with your sessions and your plugins. The plugins are going to be interesting, lots of smaller companies that will need to port stuff to Arm... to run in an eventual arm version of Pro Tools.. and I do have questions about legacy compatibility issues like ongoing reliance on OpenGL in Pro Tools. And more of a hard barrier initially than plugins is going to be interface drivers.. they do need to be ported to Arm to run at all, for many Pro Tool users that many be the first thing to worry about.

While this *is* all impressive, remember you can run Pro Tools today on a 8GB Intel Mac if you are careful... and things often seem great/"fast" until the CPU errors start, so it would be great to see more folks playing with the M1 based Macs now with real world workloads... it might well be they run really quite well.. and especially do well compared to the real performance/reliability of the broad spectrum of Macs running Pro Tools today, ranging all over the place with slow SATA HDD. Slow older Intel CPUs, old GPUs or slow (older) Intel on board graphics, installed systems with sloppy software upgrades, etc.

I have lots of geek things I'd be curious about in playing with these systems like looking at overhead of Rosetta 2. But maybe I'm glad I don't have one or I'd waste time doing that. As for just running Pro Tools on it as a user... well I'd be curious how it runs but again limited memory would make it less interesting.

For now I'm not getting an Arm box to play with, I've tested out Pro Tools 2020.11 enough on Big Sur to flip my daily driver MBP to Big Sur. I wanted to play with other stuff there, and the old Mojave disk image on that MBP was having bad problems. That 2020.11 runs at all on the M2 based Macs is great. I could see myself upgrading my 2019 MBP no sooner than around the end of 2021. Just no reason to do anything sooner. (the 32GB on that MBP will likely be its undoing, but not for Pro Tools).

Lots of thoughts, can/will Apple respin the M1 packaging with more memory or not? The M1 is impressive but as you say it's designed at a lower TDP to meet laptop like needs (including a passive cooled one!). Would they do an interim solution where they jam more memory onto the M1 package and with more aggressive cooling be able to crank up multithreaded/sustained performance in a different systems packaging? When will they have SOC at a higher TDP? With external DIMM support? With external GPU support? Would they ever do a version with no onboard GPU? (would discrete GPU and external DIMM/lack of UMA come hand in hand?). With more PCIe connectivity (for GPU and NVMe SSD).. will it have PCIe3 or 4. And on and on... I'm just hoping for now to see more detailed tear down and de capping looks inside the M1.

As for "M1". I'm going to guess that's M for Mac. And I'm expecting "M2" is going to cause lots of confusion with M.2 SSDs.