Two articles about the Intel Mac Mini: “As a fan of faster computers from Apple, I’m heartened by this week’s release of an Intel-based Mac mini. In fact, with the SPECint_rate_base2000 benchmark indicating speeds of up to four times faster than the Mac mini G4, this new crop of minis sounds just about perfect. I say ‘just about’, because of one particular issue.” And secondly, “Our first Intel-based Mac minis have arrived, straight from the Apple Store, and what was the first thing the cold, cruel alien intellects at Macworld did with one of these innocents? That’s right. We got out our putty knife, popped it open, and spilled its guts out.” Here are some XBench tests between an Intel and a G4 Mac Mini.
…more of a “Yeah so I was worried about the graphics chip thing, but I can live with it” kind of article.
…I am still impressed with Apple’s ability to squeeze all that stuff into such a small box! I am sure they tested this, but the one thing I feel more worried about is the positioning of the memory, and the potential for heat build up around it.
…is the CPU benchmark. What is that measuring? In every other CPU/memory related measurement the Intel mini overwhelms the G4 mini, but they seem equal in this one measurement.
The XBench CPU test is heavily fp dependent. So it isn’t a big surprise that the G4 with Altivec can hang around a mobile chip from Intel.
Look at the detail score in XBench. The Core Duo wins everything except the vector test. That particular test is fairly heavily optimized for the best-case G4 situation (in-cache, Altivec-enabled). The test has some relevence if you’re using the CPU in a signal-processing board, doing FFT’s all day, but isn’t very reflective of regular desktop code.
Edited 2006-03-03 00:06
I don’t understand the big deal. The 9200 is an old and outdated card anyway and anything more impressive than that would probably cause serious heat issues in such a small case. Besides the Mac Mini is a budget Mac. It isn’t made for intense 3D graphics.
I don’t understand the big deal. The 9200 is an old and outdated card anyway and anything more impressive than that would probably cause serious heat issues in such a small case. Besides the Mac Mini is a budget Mac. It isn’t made for intense 3D graphics.
As someone noted on /. (yeah I know) the GMA950 is a decent performer on the 3D front but Intel touts its capabilities for video playback :
“… native 16:9 format support for wide screen flat panels, motion compensation for smooth DVD playback and support for popular HDTV display formats …”
( http://www.intel.com/products/chipsets/gma950/ )
Which does seem to fit the mini a little better than the role of game machine.
Edited 2006-03-02 23:41
The GMA950 is just perfect for the Mini. It doesn’t draw a lot of power, and is fast enough to accelerate Quartz Extreme and CoreImage properly. It has video acceleration to offload decompression from the CPU. Basically, it’s “Just Right” for the Mini’s target market.
If you’re not a gamer, or a graphics artist, you really don’t need anything more. If you’re a gamer, a Mac isn’t for you anyway, and if you’re a graphics artist, you’re looking for a PowerMac, not a Mini.
What basically happened is that Apple fell victim for its own hype. It seems that this little page
http://web.archive.org/web/20050305044151/www.apple.com/macmini/gra…
is causing them lots of grief now
Of course, most of the technically inclined know that the 9200 is pretty pathetic and probably weaker than the GMA 950. But for the dedicated Mac fan it is a real problem.
In the past few years, when the PPC stagnated, Apple had to compensate with all kind of other hardware perks to distinguish them from the budged PC crowd. This was especially true for their laptops (illuminated keyboard, motion sensor HD, two finger scrolling), and one of the distinguishing features was “discrete graphics”. Whenever a PC-Mac comparison came up, the Mac advocate would invariably bring up “discrete graphics” as a huge advantage over budget PC boxes, no matter if their discrete graphics chip in question was several generations old. So now it’s a little difficult to swallow their words, even though for the Mini the GMA 950 is in fact a pretty nice solution.
And this isn’t like the CPU transition, where the Mac fans had a long period to adapt to the notion that x86 doesn’t really suck after all. Apple themselves were discrediting “integrated Intel graphics” on their website days, nay, hours before they released their own GMA based computer.
That is not to say that there is no reason at all to be upset with the GMA 950. Even amongst integrated graphics, the Intel is behind ATI (and nVidia, but they only produce AMD chipsets), and can only manage to beat the *really* crappy VIA and SIS integrated graphics. And second, even with the GMA they could have opted to use dedicated VRAM, instead of shared menory. The base memory is 2x256MB, and probably needs to be upgraded in pairs, so eating 80MB from that just save on dedicated VRAM just rubs people in the wrong way.
and nVidia, but they only produce AMD chipsets
Actually they do make intel chipsets. They do make a chipset for Pentium4 although I don’t think they make one with an integrated graphics controller.
http://www.abit-usa.com/products/mb/products.php?categories=1&model…
Shows off some things I didn’t know about the new mini yet : 2 RAM slots should make it easier to upgrade memory and sata for the HD should speed things up too.
With a faster processor and HD this should pretty much take care of the 2 major bottlenecks that exist in the original mini.
As soon as I heard about it’s release I was very close to buying it. I wanted to use it as a 3d modeling/rendering box, and webdesign server/workstation.
After looking around a little more out of suspicion about their lack of trumpeting the video card they’re using (you’ll notice that all the other macs have huge deals about the incredible video cards on board) I found it’s powered by…an onboard intel card with 96mb of shared memory.
Yugh…I was really excited, until I read that. Now I’m looking at a Dual 2ghz G5 PowerMac refurb
Nonetheless it is still a pretty nice machine, one could easily turn something like that into a DVR if decent software and decent hardware were available.
It looks like it will be much harder to upgrade the RAM yourself now. You have to take it completely apart just to get at the slots. You used to just have to pop the top off. I guess if I ever get rid of my G4 mini to get a Core Duo, I would have Apple upgrade the RAM at the factory, because I wouldn’t want to go through all that trouble. It’s too bad. I know a lot of people who have gotten G4 minis and we all saved money by upgrading the RAM ourselves.
Actually, the price charged by Apple on RAM upgrade for the mini is not bad and on par with others manufacturers.
If you buy 2G of Crucial memory for example, it would cost you slightly more then then just getting the upgrade from Apple.
“Actually, the price charged by Apple on RAM upgrade for the mini is not bad and on par with others manufacturers.
If you buy 2G of Crucial memory for example, it would cost you slightly more then then just getting the upgrade from Apple.”
I thought this was a little odd, so looked at the Apple UK site:
http://store.apple.com/Apple/WebObjects/ukstore.woa/6094008/wo/bL3R…
from which it appears that the incremental price of an extra 512 of memory, taking the box to 1G, is going to be UK 70, and for an extra 1.5G, taking the box to 2G total, is going to be UK 210.
This seemed a bit rich, since I just bought a matched pair of 512s for a UK site for what I seemed to recall as around UK 50 ex vat, so I checked on what the stuff costs on ebuyer, for 1G memory:
http://www.ebuyer.co.uk/customer/products/index.html?rb=16751342189…
Well, maybe there are some among you who think that 60+ vat x 2 = 120 plus vat [which by the way is for a full 2G, whereas the 210 buys you only an extra 1.5G] is about the same as, or cheaper than, 210. Raise your hands.
You cannot believe anything Apple apologists say on open forums about pricing unless you check it. When you do, it is mostly false. Why bother saying this stuff?
Or perhaps the argument is, the 70 extra for the extra 512 is actually buying you 1G, not just an extra 512, and 70 for 1G is about the going rate?
Get serious!
Edited 2006-03-03 08:55
I am still trying to find those 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM SODIMMs on the ebuyers site you pointed to.
I’ve just checked for us, Canadians. The price seem “ok”.
Apple: 2GB 667 DDR2 SDRAM – 2x1GB
[Add $360 CAD]
Crucial: 1GB DDR2 PC2-5300 • CL=5 • UNBUFFERED • NON-ECC • DDR2-667 • 1.8V • 128Meg x 64
[Add $187.99 US]
Write in haste and irritation, aplogise at leisure!
You are right and I was wrong.
What’s on the site for around 60 Sterling in the 1G size, is PC 4300 533Mhz. If you go to the Crucial site
http://www.crucial.com/uk/store/listparts.asp?Mfr%2BProductline…
the 1G in PC 5300 is Sterling 120.
Sorry.
210 Sterling still seems an awful lot for 1.5G though…
Nice to see that there’s a standard 2.5″ SATA HDD in there. I doubt that there’s any difference in speed due to the SATA interface, it’s not like 2.5″ drives come close to fully using ATA100, but it makes it nice and easy to upgrade to a faster and larger 7200RPM HDD in the future.
From what I’ve heard the capacity of next gen 2.5″ drives could reach 200Gb+ by the end of the year thanks to perpendicular storage. That amount of space and some extra HDD speed would be very useful if using the Mac Mini as a PVR with an external TV tuner.
They could have at least put in a 128MB integrated graphics chip.
This is not the first time apple has used shared video memory.
The IIci:
http://www.lowendmac.com/ii/iici.shtml
The IIsi:
http://www.lowendmac.com/ii/iisi.shtml
I thought they had learned their lesson after the IIsi. (It’s not the integrated video I’m moaning about so much as the shared VRAM… it’s perfectly possible to have decent integrated video when every video operation doesn’t require access to main memory
)
I thought they had learned their lesson after the IIsi. (It’s not the integrated video I’m moaning about so much as the shared VRAM… it’s perfectly possible to have decent integrated video when every video operation doesn’t require access to main memory
)
True, if one were to compare like with like, in terms of the target market, why not do what Toshiba did with their low end laptop, and use a Radeon Xpress 200, which had 64MB of dedicated video memory, but with UMA, it could spread it self into main memory if it needed more – that would have been the better way to go IMHO.
It looks like the Intel Mac Mini is more a product of Intel than actually something done by Apple.
An integrated graphics chipset just doesn’t feel right. At least I would expect Apple to drop prices a bit. I don’t think that the current pricing scheme that Apple uses is competitive or even `luring’ at least hardware-wise. My take is that such hardware will alienate many users. Guess that when it comes to minis Apple bets on the high optimization of OsX for CoreDuos to leverage things a bit. Who knows.
That many people, like myself were eyeing at the mini to replace their pcs (I already have a mini which does it as an excellent home server)
But having such a replacement in the sight of having an OSX on your hands which stresses the graphics 3d area of every card and that Vista will be the first Windows to run mac as well, and that some people like to play games after all, does lead nowhere.
The main problem is, that Apple really messed this up. Intel graphics cards have a really lousy reputation, partially thanks to being integrated in half of the Centrino notebook computers, so everyone already knows what he is getting.
Apple could have done it right, by providing an upgrade path for those who need a little bit more graphical power, but they really messed this up this time.
Ok the new intel graphics chip is not as bad as the old one, and is a little bit faster than the old Radeon 9200 in the old mini. But in the old mini the graphics performance really was a huge issue in OSX and given the fact that the i950 is only somwhat slower I see a problem here.
I bet many people are holding off now until this problem is fixed, given that the tone is pretty much the same all over the web… Excellent machine, but what where they thinking putting this graphics card in there.
Apple for sure has lost a lot of sales over this, for now. I hope they are aware of that.
Apple for sure has lost a lot of sales over this, for now. I hope they are aware of that.
I doubt it. People aren’t buying Mac Minis to play games. Those that do are buying the intended machines, the iMacs. There is no problem.
Most people will be please to know that Tiger will be fully accelerated now. I know I am.
“People aren’t buying Mac Minis to play games.”
Hmmm … well if the minis could play games in a decent way (just like the old ones somewhat could) people would opt for that cause it would be the cheapest thing to do. Now they have to opt for higher-end macs and price might get in their way. I have played games in previous (G4) minis and it wasn’t a bad experience at all. Now that the demands in hardware are getting more and more on the behalf of game-vendors, I can’t see how the mini can keep up (in six months/one year). Even if CoreDuo gave some advantage to the new minis (20%/40%) over the G4 ones, that advantage is blown in the wind with the integrated graphics controller.
Edited 2006-03-03 12:46
It is not only because of games, OSX and Vista are a stress test on the graphics hardware, even the old Radeon 9200 on the old Mini was a huge problem once you hit a resolution higher than 1024×768.
Lots of people already have monitors, actually most PC switchers have one, so the IMac usually is a non option.
I really love the IMacs, but the monitor would be rather pointless.
I am sure next year there will be a mini with an ATI or NVidia notebook graphics controller, until then, no money from me (and given the overall negative comments, probably from a lot of other people as well)
Apple still mentions the Mini on their Games page, oh well:
http://www.apple.com/games/hardware/
At least they changed the little blurp from
“While the Mac mini makes for a great gateway to the Internet, it’s also an excellent system for games” (for the PowerPC mini)
to
“While the Mac mini makes for a great gateway to the Internet, it’s also a wonderful system for the casual gamer.” (for the Intel mini)
I guess it’s a little more accurate.
Edited 2006-03-03 13:39
I did not like the first round of Minis and thought it was a huge waste of money.
But this is pretty nice. Dual core proc, 512mb of RAM, plus all the iApps, and FrontRow. Not bad at all.
Plus you can install Windows on it, so you aren’t stuck with just MacOS apps.
Try: “Ah lying!”
So, on Monday, February 27, an integrated graphics chip was something that stole power from the CPU and siphoned off system memory. As of February 28, it’s suddenly capable of supporting the latest 3-D games and is an incredible value proposition? Ah, marketing!
This is typical Apple of late. One day Intel sucks, today it rocks. And it’s not a slow realization, no, it’s a instantaneous company wide change of _lie_.
Apple makes nice products, but seriously, don’t believe them…
I don’t think I’d recommend an Intel Mini to anyone. It’s great to be on OS X over doze, but I wouldn’t want to see OS X on integrated graphics.
Hallo all:
The area of weakness here is possibly the graphics. However, perhaps it not quite as off base as it may seem to some. I refer you to this link:
http://macdailynews.com/index.php/weblog/comments/8772/
The price is a bit too heavy, but its an apple machine, and I think it will serve many users well. Also, it seems the processor may be upgraded;a
plus indeed!
My prediction: Give it time and it will sell itself.
Someday I want one.
Cheers-UandMe
mmm, the screenshots with the movies look rather blocky.
1080i is supposed to be highres…
I liked it until the 64mb shared memory.
I’ll wait and see if they come out with a new iBook with Intel Core Duo.
Apple switched processors because Apple couldn’t depend on availablity. The G5 is superior in hardware design over the Intel Pentium Processors. Anyone who studies computer science knows that. And benchmarks can be programmed and conducted to “prefer” one architecture over another. It is very easy to fudge. I wanted to own a piece of history so I just ordered my dual processor g5 with the PCI/e bus and up to 8GB of RAM. This box will dual boot OS/X and Linux.
Too Bad Apple did not work with IBM to base the G6 on the up and comming IBM P6 processor. The P6 is going to be huge!
The G5 is superior to a Pentium, yes. Unfortunately for the G5, the Pentium was Intel’s chip circa 1995…
Also, what does computer science have to do with chip design? Computer science people tend to have very idealized models of processors, and are just the sort of people who’d tend to think that an elegant external interface (PPC machine code), imples an elegant internal design.
It’s true that benchmarks can be fudged to prefer one architecture over another. Fortunately, SPEC is not one of those benchmarks. Certainly, SPEC does not inherently favor x86 over PowerPC. If it did, how do you explain the fact that POWER5 gets much better per-clock performance in SPEC than the Opteron, while the PowerPC 970 does substantially worse? They’re the same ISA after all!
Edited 2006-03-03 20:00
“Also, what does computer science have to do with chip design? Computer science people tend to have very idealized models of processors, and are just the sort of people who’d tend to think that an elegant external interface (PPC machine code), imples an elegant internal design.”
I think that the truth is always somewhere in the middle. Computer scientistists have contributed a lot to modern computers — and yes their idealism hurts sometimes, but hey, the extreme-practicallity of non-idealists hurts sometimes too doesn’t it? As for the elegant design you have to admit that there is nothing wrong with being careful in desinging. If you mean to have a fine result you have to be careful while desinging the thing from the ground up. Even some small flaws in design may cost too much in the end product. It’s a `seed winds – harvest tornadoes’ situation.
“It’s true that benchmarks can be fudged to prefer one architecture over another. Fortunately, SPEC is not one of those benchmarks. Certainly, SPEC does not inherently favor x86 over PowerPC. If it did, how do you explain the fact that POWER5 gets much better per-clock performance in SPEC than the Opteron, while the PowerPC 970 does substantially worse? They’re the same ISA after all!”
I’ve been persuaded by your last posts that Intel (like AMD) `did it’s homework’ with the Duos and increased their performance. But still the point our friend is trying to make here is valid. G5 processors (like you said rayiner) kinda failed (for Apple) because of lack in R&D and availability. Had there IBM been a little nicer with them and Apple —I think too that— it would have been a different story that (unfortunately) we’ll never get to see.
I think that the truth is always somewhere in the middle. Computer scientistists have contributed a lot to modern computers — and yes their idealism hurts sometimes, but hey, the extreme-practicallity of non-idealists hurts sometimes too doesn’t it?
My point is not that idealism is not important. I’m a big supporter of idealism in computer science — I think there is a distinct lack of it. My point is that the elegance of the G5 is mostly superficial. PowerPC is elegant, x86 is not, but since neither chip is internally PowerPC or x86, what counts most heavily is the elegance of the internal design. The G5 is elegant in certain ways (3-address operations throughout, mostly symmetric functional units), and quite inelegant in others (no integrated memory controller, obscure scheduling rules, etc).
To put it simply: I just wish that people looking for elegance would look more than “skin deep” and evaluate the architectures for what they really are. As I said, the G5 has its share of elegant design. So does the Opteron — its integer core uses a very elegant renaming/scheduling mechanism. So does the Core Duo —micro-ops fusion is an elegant way of increasing IPC without making the core wider.