In this latest audio power test, we put the new M1 Mac Mini against its Intel sibling to see how they both perform, in Pro Tools 2020.
Our audio power test articles are a series of tests we do across various DAW's to see how they perform against benchmark machines. We have already run Apple MacBook Pro M1 Audio Power Test in Pro Tools, Apple MacBook Pro M1 Audio Power Test - Studio One and Audio Power Test with Apple Logic Pro and Space Designer if you want to see how they performed.
Our Test Apple Mac
Apple Mac Mini M1, 2020
Apple M1 SoC chip
Memory 16GB
1TB SSD
Pro Tools Ultimate 2020.12
OS 11.2.1 Big Sur
Our Benchmark Machine
Apple Intel Mac Mini, 2018
3,2GHz 6 core i7
Memory 32GB
1TB SSD
Pro Tools Ultimate 2020.12
OS 10.15.7 Catalina
The Pro Tools Power Test
As with all our power tests, we are not aware of any current Pro Tools benchmark, so we created our own. The test session is as follows;
We create 128 audio tracks with audio on every track, with audio edits taking place every few seconds.
Every track has fader automation throughout playback for the entire session.
On every audio track, we insert Channel Strip and D-verb, so that's 128 instances of each.
We add 256 instrument tracks, insert Boom! with MIDI so all instances are playing the virtual instrument.
Then we add as many instances of Avid Eleven LE until the session no longer plays without giving playback errors.
The process is simple. We copy and add as many instances of each track until Pro Tools stops working reliably.
We'd like you to note again that this is not an audio test, so we have muted all throughout. Our tests are purely to report how powerful the computer is. Secondly, the M1 power test sits on macOS Big Sur, which isn't officially supported when using Pro Tools - at this time.
If you would like to run the test on your machine, download the Pro Tools power test.
Finally, these tests are not an endorsement or recommendation of using an M1 powered Apple Mac right now. We produce these power test articles to indicate the kind of power you might expect to get once Pro Tools is ported to run on Big Sur on the new Apple M1 computers.
You can read more about what software is supported with Big Sur using our Big Sur compatibility guide.
Session settings, including sample rate, buffer and dropout protection were identical on both machines. The internal sound card was used in both tests.
Here are previous power test numbers for comparison.
Summary
The difference between the results from the M1 Mac Mini and the i7 Mac Mini in this test (in green and orange on the table above) might look like just a handful of plugins, but in addition to the audio and instrument tracks the Eleven LE plugins are a simple way to add processor intensive tasks to these machines. With the systems already kept working hard, adding these Guitar Amp Sim plugins are the tasks which add the strain which pushed them over the edge.
The Intel Mac Mini shows considerably improved performance over the newer M1 Mac. The conventional wisdom is that a newer Mac is a faster Mac so it might be tempting to see this as a failing on the the part of the M1 Mac but we would argue that this isn’t the case for a few reasons.
RAM Differences
We have compared these two machines because they were the machines we had available. The M1 Mac has 16Gb of RAM the Intel has 32Gb of RAM. The influence of this compared to the relative speeds of the processors is untested but it remains a fact that more RAM is never a bad thing. If this test were to be conducted with machines specifically chosen for the test, having both machines running the same amount of RAM would be desirable.
The M1 Mac is running Pro Tools through Rosetta 2, the translator software which allows an Apple Silicon Mac to run Intel software. While Rosetta 2 is remarkably effective it inevitably has an effect on the performance compared to an M1 Mac running software designed for that architecture.
To find out more about how M1 chips use RAM read Why The Apple M1 Chip Is So Fast - A Developer Explains
Price
Lastly there is the relative cost of the machines. A 2018 Mac mini of this spec costs approximately twice what the M1 Mac mini costs. While the next iteration of the Apple Silicon machines are yet to be officially announced, the M1 series of Macs are considered to be the entry level machines and more powerful Apple Silicon Macs are expected in the future. The i7 Mini isn’t an entry level Intel Mac and as such it could be argued that we aren’t comparing like with like. All of this should be kept in mind when interpreting these results.
With all that said, the results shown by this entry level M1 Mac running unsupported software via a translator hint towards some impressive results when Pro Tools is finally available as native Apple Silicon software.