Apple M4 Mac Mini With macOS vs. Intel / AMD With Ubuntu Linux Performance
The M4 Mac Mini managed to lead in raw performance when it came to the single-threaded FLAC audio encoding.
For AVIF image encoding the results were mixed for the raw performance but the M4 remained mighty interesting for its power efficiency.
The Apple M4 was delivering great performance-per-Watt for JPEG-XL image encoding.
With the assortment of CPU benchmarks carried out the Apple M4 Mac Mini on macOS Sequoia was tending to perform similar to the AMD Ryzen 5 9600X / Ryzen 7 9800X3D desktop processors on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. But where the M4 was really a standout winner was in the performance-per-Watt with the power efficiency typically well in the lead compared to the tested x86_64 desktop processors on Linux.
Keep in mind that this is an M4 macOS vs. Intel/AMD Linux comparison. Once Asahi Linux is up and running on the M4 devices reasonably well, I'll be eager to run some 1:1 Linux benchmarks. But that is likely to be some months away... Keeping in mind that Asahi Linux is still working on Apple M1/M2 improvements and upstreaming their work there. The Apple M3 and M4 enablement will also be ongoing at the same time by these open-source Linux developers. In any event it will be interesting to see how well and how soon the Apple M4 begins working on Linux and how its performance compares between macOS and Linux and then for a pure Linux showdown of the Apple M4 against AMD Ryzen and Intel Core on Linux.
In any event these M4 Mac Mini numbers are quite exciting on the hardware side and the redesigned Mac Mini is a nice improvement especially with now having 16GB of unified memory for the base model. Stay tuned for more Apple M4 benchmarking on Phoronix over the months ahead as the Linux support materializes.
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