Apple M4 Mac Mini With macOS vs. Intel / AMD With Ubuntu Linux Performance
So this initial round of Mac Mini M4 testing is using macOS 15.1 compared to various modern AMD Ryzen and Intel Core desktop chips plus an AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 laptop (ASUS Zenbook S 16) as well for reference. The laptops were tested on the latest Ubuntu Linux and its respective software components there... With using the stock environment of each platform, that means LLVM/Clang Xcode on macOS and GCC with Ubuntu Linux, etc. Once Asahi Linux is well supporting the Apple M4 chip it will make for more interesting 1:1 comparisons but for now is thus a higher level look at how the M4 Mac Mini with macOS compares to Intel/AMD x86_64 performance on Ubuntu Linux as a whole.
The M4 CPU power consumption was monitored using the "powermetrics" utility and the Intel/AMD CPU power consumption was using its Linux PowerCAP/RAPL interface. On the Intel side was the Core Ultra 5 245K and Core Ultra 9 295K Arrow Lake processors and on the AMD side was the Ryzen 5 9600X, Ryzen 7 9700X, Ryzen 7 9800X3D, Ryzen 9 9900X, and Ryzen 9 9950X. Let's continue with this preliminary look at the Apple M4 with macOS vs. Intel/AMD with Ubuntu 24.04 LTS Linux performance -- again, a better 1:1 match-up will come once Linux is actually running on the Apple M4 devices...