Apple last week released their latest iMac, Mac Mini, and MacBook Pro products powered by their fourth-generation M-series Apple Silicon. The new Mac Mini in particular is interesting for under $600 starting out with the all re-designed Mac Mini with 10-core M4 and now the base model having 16GB of memory. It will take some time before there is any reasonable Linux support on the M4 hardware with Asahi Linux, but for those curious about how the M4 Mac Mini with macOS compares to AMD Ryzen and Intel Core CPUs under Linux, here are some preliminary benchmarks.
I was curious enough about the Apple M4 SoC and performance claims being made against Intel/AMD processors that I decided to buy one of the new Mac Minis. The new Mac Mini models are interesting for their newer and more compact design, making use of the new M4 SoC where as there was not an M3 Mac Mini model, the base $599 model now having 16GB of system memory rather than 8GB of RAM, and eventually being a very interesting candidate for Linux vs. macOS testing once Asahi Linux support is underway… But for now, it’s about using/testing the Mac Mini under macOS.
With time we’ll likely see nice support on (Asahi) Linux for the Apple M4 devices but it will likely be some time. Keep in mind Asahi Linux developers are still wrapping up their Apple M1 and M2 support as well as upstreaming various support patches there. The Apple M3 support for Asahi Linux is much more primitive and still in its early stages. It looks like they’ll be focusing on both M3 and M4 enablement in tandem. The current feature support for those interested can be found on the Asahi Wiki as well as the Fedora support page.
The new $599 USD Mac Mini features the Apple M4 with 16GB of RAM, 10-core GPU, 16-core Neural Engine, and its unified memory is rated for 120GB/s memory bandwidth. The base model has a 256GB SSD and Gigabit Ethernet but configurable up to 10Gb Ethernet. The highest-end Mac Mini at $1399 USD tops out with 12 CPU cores, 16-core GPU, 16-core Neural Engine, and 24GB of unified memory with 273GB/s memory bandwidth and upgradeable to 48GB or 64GB of memory.
The new Mac Mini design comes in at just 2 x 5 x 5 inches — nearly half the size of earlier models.
