Hardware

Before we get into the benchmark results, let’s take a look at the new Mac mini’s design.

Design

As promised by Apple, the new mini is substantially smaller than the older design, used from 2010 to 2022. While it remains a tiny silver box, absolutely none of the older design remains in this new model, which is both much smaller than the older design, and slightly taller. Our first impression was that it looks like a baby Mac Studio, far moreso than the Apple TV, which is what it was originally rumored to be designed after.

In terms of rackability, this won’t be a problem for us, and our initial rack designs will focus on maintaining the same density as our existing rack designs, with potential improvements over time as we gain more experience with the new form factor. We have already started to set the new machines up in our data centers, with general availability on our website on November 11th, just one business day after release.

Over the last few weeks, we have been testing rack designs with 3D-printed prototypes, which have turned out to be extremely close, if not perfectly identical, to the final machine design. We express many thanks to our talented engineering team for this exceptionally fast launch.

In terms of ports and connectivity, the new Mini hasn’t made any compromises. Just as before, the mini comes with an onboard Ethernet adaptor (including 10Gb options, which we leverage quite heavily on our larger models), and an integrated AC adaptor, both of which are vital in ensuring that we can continue to deliver our solutions at scale, and with the reliability that our customers expect.



In addition to these, the Mac mini with M4 comes with plenty of high-bandwidth Thunderbolt and USB 3.0 connectivity, with the M4 Pro models offering 120Gb/s of bandwidth using Thunderbolt 5.

When we first heard the rumors and the announcement from Apple, we had some initial concerns about the new design, and what it would mean for our ability to deliver M4 as a solution for our customers. Now that we’ve gotten our hands on the hardware, we have found that the new mini remains an excellent machine for hosted compute at scale, just as the previous generations have been, with even greater potential for scale in its new form factor.

M4 and M4 Pro

Apple has made some interesting changes with both M4 and M4 Pro, compared to both the M2 and M3 generations. Compared to the M2 generation, the M4 represents two generations of improvement in single core performance, along with an increase in performance core allocations on M4 Pro. Given this, we expect that M4 will deliver a large improvement in performance across the entire lineup.

Core configurations

M4

For the Mac mini, the M4 is available in just one configuration:



10 Core

• 4 performance cores

• 6 efficiency cores

• 10 GPU cores



Compared to M2 and M3, the M4 adds 2 efficiency cores, while maintaining the 4 performance cores. Given past results, we do not expect the efficiency cores to meaningfully speed up computationally intensive tasks, but they should help in general system performance, as lower-priority tasks are offloaded to them. Apple has also added 2 GPU cores to the standard model, which should help with graphics intensive tasks and general AI/ML performance (certainly a priority with their heavy emphasis on Apple Intelligence).

M4 Pro

The M4 Pro is available in two configurations:



12 Core

• 8 performance cores

• 4 efficiency cores

• 16 GPU cores



14 Core

• 10 performance cores

• 4 efficiency cores

• 20 GPU cores



Apple’s emphasis on performance cores in the M4 Pro is extremely interesting, and a return to form, more closely resembling the core layouts used in the M2 Pro chips, but with two additional performance cores at each level. This difers from Apple’s approach with M3 Pro. With 6 performance cores and 6 efficiency cores in the previous high-end model, M3 Pro didn’t offer a substantial increase in performance over M2 Pro, it emphasized efficiency over total performance.



We expect the M4 Pro to deliver a large improvement in general performance on benchmarks and for CI/CD use, as we have found that Mac performance correlates closely to the number of performance cores on the chip.

Benchmarks

To better evaluate the M4, and to determine where these new machines fit in our lineup, we ran a new set of benchmarks across our entire standard line of Mac hardware. This new set of benchmarks incorporates new versions of macOS and Xcode, as well as an updated version of Cinebench.

Configurations

On launch, we were only able to get two configurations of Mac mini with M4. The first is the base model, which matches our M4.S configuration, and will be available on the Portal. This first model features M4 with 10 CPU cores, 10 GPU cores, 16GB of RAM, and 256GB of storage.

The second configuration that we were able to purchase for testing was a Mac mini with M4 Pro (12-core), with 12 CPU cores, 16 GPU cores, 24GB of RAM, and 512GB of storage. This configuration doesn’t exactly match the standard models that we will offer, but we expect its performance to roughly match our M4.L configuration, which is an M4 Pro with 12 CPU cores, 16 GPU cores, 32GB of RAM, and 1TB of storage.



Unfortunately, we were not able to source an M4 Pro with 14 CPU cores on launch day (which would match our M4.XL configuration), but we will have another post up as soon as we can benchmark this machine, as well as additional analysis on NPU and general ML/AI performance for all machines.

Our methodology

Similar to past benchmarks, we use a combination of Cinebench, Geekbench, and XcodeBenchmark to determine the performance of Mac hardware.



For this iteration of benchmark results, we used the following software versions across all of the tested hardware:



• macOS 15.1

• Xcode 16.1

• Cinebench 2024.1.0

• Geekbench 6.3



As with our previous benchmarking efforts, each benchmark was run 3 times, with the best result out of 3 used as the official score. This time, we did reduce the 10-minute cooldown time between tests to 5 minutes, as we found that it had minimal effect on the final results.

Tests

Cinebench 2024

Cinebench is a commonly used benchmark focused on raw CPU performance. This benchmark is a great indicator of the pure compute power of a given CPU in a computer. Its cross-platform availability allows for the direct comparison of CPUs across architectures and OSes.



Additionally, the benchmark always runs for a minimum of 10 consecutive minutes, which can help measure thermal impacts on performance across sustained workloads. Due to its narrow focus on CPU-based rendering, it only reflects the raw compute power of the CPU and may not represent real-world performance for general applications.

Geekbench 6 Multi-core

To get a sense of real-world CPU performance, we use Geekbench 6 Multi-core. Geekbench 6 is a cross-platform benchmark that measures the performance of common real-world tasks in a replicable, synthetic manner. The Multi-core result was selected for comparison because it reflects the total compute power of a given machine.



Additionally, with Apple Silicon, Mac models of a given generation differ primarily on the number of cores available on the CPU. Compared to Cinebench, Geekbench better reflects real-world performance on common tasks, and we have found that the results correlate closely to other real-world benchmarks.

Geekbench 6 Compute

To measure each machine’s GPU, we used Geekbench 6’s Compute benchmark, which runs a GPU-accelerated compute benchmark using Metal. The goal of this test is to provide a relative GPU performance measure across different Macs, which has a direct impact on graphics processing tasks, AI/ML tasks, and other GPU-accelerated workloads.

XcodeBenchmark

As many of our customers run CI/CD workflows, we have included XcodeBenchmark, by Maxim Eremenko. This benchmark simulates the build of an extremely complex iOS application, with a large selection of popular component libraries and complex dependencies. This test is used to gauge the relative performance of Macs against each other when building applications in Xcode.

Results

The base M4 offers a solid upgrade over the previous generation, coming very close to the top-end M2 Pro chip in general compute performance, albeit with less general GPU performance and slightly slower performance in Xcode. Depending on the benchmark, it offers a 30-50% improvement in general performance over the older M2 base model chip, which is in-line with our expectations, given that they have the same number of performance cores, and with M4 being two generations newer. For general use, this model is a solid upgrade over past Apple desktop models, delivering Pro performance for less, and cutting Xcode build times down substantially when compared to previous lower-end chips.



The M4 Pro, on the other hand, offers a very meaningful upgrade over past generations. Even in its lower-end 12 core configuration, the M4 Pro tears past all of the previously available Mac mini models, and even puts some of the older Studio models to shame. For CPU-bound tasks, this lower-end M4 Pro is roughly equivalent to the M1 Ultra in performance, winning in some benchmarks and losing in others, and comes very close to the M2 Ultra in some of the more optimized CPU benchmarks, such as Geekbench.



All of this said, the Studio line holds its own when it comes to GPU performance, where the increased die size of the Max and Ultra chips and the improved thermals of the Studio design allow for substantially more GPU capacity, with many more cores than in the mini. That said, we are eagerly anticipating the arrival of our 14-core M4 Pro machine, as we think it may be possible that the M4 Pro may match or beat the M2 Ultra for certain workloads. For CI/CD workloads in particular, the Mac mini is a more cost-effective option, offering much of the same performance as the Studio machines for less.

Final thoughts on the new Mac mini

As said in the introduction, the Mac mini with M4 is the most significant update to the Mac mini in its entire history. With this generation, Apple has not only redesigned the case. They delivered a comprehensive upgrade in performance, offering Pro-level performance as a baseline, and matching larger, far more expensive Mac models at the top end, all in a tiny, lower-cost machine.

M4 Pro in particular has exceeded our expectations. By adding additional performance cores to each configuration, the M4 Pro goes beyond typical generational improvements, and jumps up a tier in performance, rivaling Apple’s previous Ultra chips, which are far larger, more expensive, and power-hungry. We are anxious to test out the 14 core configuration, which should offer an even larger gain in performance. We plan to test this new configuration, alongside some other benchmarks, in part 2 of our Mac mini with M4 review series.

Get the M4 Mac mini with MacStadium

Mac mini with M4 is currently available at MacStadium, starting with our M4.S configuration. We expect to have the rest of our standard configurations, including M4.M, M4.L, and M4.XL, available within the next few weeks. You can view our available options, and preorder your configurations at the following link: