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M1 Mac Mini


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Just now, Pat Stanford said:

If you want to be able to to Run VW and TM, you are going to want more than 16GB. Especially if you are talking about the Mac Studio.

 

I would not consider less than 64GB to future proof yourself for the next 3+ years.

Ya---kinda what I figured. I am running 40GB on a 2017 iMac and I maxed out the other day--prolly that leak.

I don't want to spend Mac Studio dollars, so I reckon its wait until a new MIni comes out.

I have 2 27" iMacs, so I would like to use them.

 

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Just now, Pat Stanford said:

Many people are using Mini with 16GB effectively. But if you want both VW and TM then a Mini with 32GB would be a better choice.

Thanks, Pat--this is the kid of real world stuff that is helpful.

From what I see at Apple--the current Mini with Apple silicon is 16 tops.

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14 minutes ago, ParkerJames said:

I don't want to spend Mac Studio dollars,

 

The double spec of the Ultra doesn't scale as expected so far.

So more interesting is the Studio Max. It goes up to 64 GB memory,

which I would chose at minimum.

(On one hand it is shared between CPU and GPU ans so less than

64 GB on an Intel Mac, on the other hand it has a good memory and

swap management)

So this should be reasonable memory amount for a few coming years,

for VW and TM.

 

Just that the Max misses the double CPU cores of the Ultra, for e.g.

standard RW rendering.

 

Usually my M1 Mini 16 GB works fine but I usually have larger projects

from clients, non-optimized RVT or IFC imports where the Mini  completely

fails. I could maybe work reasonably with a single RFT import but I would

need to combine about 10+ of these imports ideally.

(Which does also not work on the PC with 64 GB RAM and 16 GB VRAM)

 

Well, even my Trash Can from 2014 had already 32 GB RAM + 2x 6 GB VRAM.

My PC is basically (some upgrades) 4 years old now. If I buy a PC or workstation

now, I would usually demand for 128 GB and a competitive GPU just for

principle.

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21 minutes ago, zoomer said:

 

The double spec of the Ultra doesn't scale as expected so far.

So more interesting is the Studio Max. It goes up to 64 GB memory,

which I would chose at minimum.

(On one hand it is shared between CPU and GPU ans so less than

64 GB on an Intel Mac, on the other hand it has a good memory and

swap management)

So this should be reasonable memory amount for a few coming years,

for VW and TM.

 

Just that the Max misses the double CPU cores of the Ultra, for e.g.

standard RW rendering.

 

Usually my M1 Mini 16 GB works fine but I usually have larger projects

from clients, non-optimized RVT or IFC imports where the Mini  completely

fails. I could maybe work reasonably with a single RFT import but I would

need to combine about 10+ of these imports ideally.

(Which does also not work on the PC with 64 GB RAM and 16 GB VRAM)

 

Well, even my Trash Can from 2014 had already 32 GB RAM + 2x 6 GB VRAM.

My PC is basically (some upgrades) 4 years old now. If I buy a PC or workstation

now, I would usually demand for 128 GB and a competitive GPU just for

principle.

There is a rumor about new Minis come June.

We will see.

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5 minutes ago, ParkerJames said:

There is a rumor about new Minis come June.

 

There are also rumors M2 will come at the end of the year or later ....

Many think that M2 will unlikely be announced before Mac Pro will

come with potentially M1 (Ultra) only (?)

 

So far the new M? SoC architecture came first for iPhones, the next Tic or Toc

was the iPad with an M?x SoC, followed by the next iPhone with M?+1,

which was newer but nevertheless not faster than the blown up iPad's Mx with

more cores RAM and so on.

Same happened for the M1, which came after the iPad's A 14x (?).

(Which come now into iPads for economic reasons, because it is already there)

 

So it would totally screw Apples Tic Toc thing and marketing after a successful

decade, if they would would announce a M2 + M2 Pro Mini soon but announce

a M1 something Mac Pro ....

Or even unlikely that they bring all M2 SoC stages at a time.

 

But who besides Mr Cook will know ....

First, many say that any M1 chips will not allow more than combining 2 SoCs

like the M1 Ultra = 2x M1 Max. And this would be disappointing to have an

Mac Pro Ultra only.

Second, it was said that the Ultra was the last M1 iteration.

 

So there is a little hope that M2 will be released in June, followed later by

an M2 Pro, later M2 Max, M2 Ultra ....  while on WWDC a M2 4x Max Mac Pro

will be, as always, only announced at WWDC > to release in late 2022,

that will be finally really available in early 2023 ....

 

 

 

It just depends if you need a new Mac urgently now or you can easily wait 12

or 18 months easily.

 

As you are already max out your 40 GB RAM iMac from time to time,

I would say it is still OK to go with a 64 GB M1 Max in a MBP or Studio.

(because of the better memory management and faster swapping in Apple ARM)

 

 

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5 minutes ago, zoomer said:

 

There are also rumors M2 will come at the end of the year or later ....

Many think that M2 will unlikely be announced before Mac Pro will

come with potentially M1 (Ultra) only (?)

 

So far the new M? SoC architecture came first for iPhones, the next Tic or Toc

was the iPad with an M?x SoC, followed by the next iPhone with M?+1,

which was newer but nevertheless not faster than the blown up iPad's Mx with

more cores RAM and so on.

Same happened for the M1, which came after the iPad's A 14x (?).

(Which come now into iPads for economic reasons, because it is already there)

 

So it would totally screw Apples Tic Toc thing and marketing after a successful

decade, if they would would announce a M2 + M2 Pro Mini soon but announce

a M1 something Mac Pro ....

Or even unlikely that they bring all M2 SoC stages at a time.

 

But who besides Mr Cook will know ....

First, many say that any M1 chips will not allow more than combining 2 SoCs

like the M1 Ultra = 2x M1 Max. And this would be disappointing to have an

Mac Pro Ultra only.

Second, it was said that the Ultra was the last M1 iteration.

 

So there is a little hope that M2 will be released in June, followed later by

an M2 Pro, later M2 Max, M2 Ultra ....  while on WWDC a M2 4x Max Mac Pro

will be, as always, only announced at WWDC > to release in late 2022,

that will be finally really available in early 2023 ....

 

 

 

It just depends if you need a new Mac urgently now or you can easily wait 12

or 18 months easily.

 

As you are already max out your 40 GB RAM iMac from time to time,

I would say it is still OK to go with a 64 GB M1 Max in a MBP or Studio.

(because of the better memory management and faster swapping in Apple ARM)

 

 

Ya--makes sense business wise. I am not desperate, but would like to have Redshift available in reasonable fashion and TM--since the license offer. Its waiting on my greasy little drive.

🙂

 

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Me tooo.

 

I bought my M1 Mini just for playing and testing.

I was never expecting and very positive surprised that I can open

my files at all on that low spec M1 machine.

 

Basically I wait for a reasonable 3D compatible Mac since 2012.

Don't want always just interims machines like my Trash Can or

M1 Mini forever.

I always hoped for a Mac Midi like Studio now.

But so far it fails as a first generation device. There is a design and

hardware bottleneck - as long as you do not optimize your code -

not only for native Apple ARM - and Metal - but also for tiled rendering

with your Apps memory allocation.

Which will be compatible with Apple ARM only and needs large code

adaptions. And which cross plat form App developer will ever do such,

again another, code optimization ?

 

So far with M1, if you do not care about tiled rendering (which is great BTW)

it seems that the Cache will overflow and the GPU will just wait half of the time

for data and will lower clock and energy consumption.

That is worse the more GPU cores you order.

So for now the most reasonable Studio is a M1 Max with binned 24 only GPU

cores. Only Ultra if you can make use of 20 CPU cores (e.g. CPU Rendering)

128 GB memory. And better also the binned 48 GPU core version.

 

 

 

 

 

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The debate, or controversy, over the Ultra's poor GPU scaling in rendering applications has happened in a bit of vacuum unfortunately. WWDC should be interesting. Maxon / Redshift has just commented, in their forum, in an encouraging way while outlining that there are significant architectural differences to accommodate. I hope they don't mind their comments being reposted here, since we're in the family 🙃 so to speak:

 

619933676_Panos1.thumb.png.881f91ea4e408fbc9e905e7597fd8d79.png

 

663261370_Panos2.thumb.png.470b32963a143e38665d18b9a4cdcba1.png

 

Edited by M5d
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