alt Hacker NewsNot just OpenClaw. The Mac mini is just stupidly good value for a desktop computer, and the RAM prices have only enhanced its appeal.
Apple doesn't make much of a fuss about it but their chip performance is laughably ahead of the other chipmakers.
The Mac Mini M4 gets a score of 3788 in Geekbench[0]. The top of the PC processor chart is 3395[1]. It's not even Apple's latest chip!
PC processors can only keep up by adding more cores, but real world performance in many workloads is enhanced by having a smaller number of higher performance cores.
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If you remove the Mac filter, its performance is not even in the top ten
Which is obvious if you spent more then half a microsecond thinking about it, because apple silicone barely draws any power - it's performance is fantastic in it's niche, which is squarely within what a home user cares about - but it's not leading on benchmark performance, because that's not what apple designed it for
The reason its coincidentally good for local ai inference is also just down to the fact the embedded GPU has shared memory access to the system VRAM. That means low performance/throughput but large memory.
Which is great for home use, but once again not gonna top charts.
Geekbench is basically trash. People keep using it for comparing Mac performance because many of the things people usually benchmark don't run on Macs.
But single-number outputs like that are useless. Is the number ~10% higher because it's consistently ~10% faster at everything, or because it's 100% faster on a minority of things and slower at everything else? The first one is pretty unlikely when comparing processors with different designs, and indeed that isn't it:
https://www.phoronix.com/review/apple-m4-intel-amd-linux/4
https://www.phoronix.com/review/apple-m4-intel-amd-linux/5
https://www.phoronix.com/review/apple-m4-intel-amd-linux/6
https://www.phoronix.com/review/apple-m4-intel-amd-linux/7
The CPU in those charts with a similar TDP to the M4 is the Ryzen HX 370. You can see that the M4 is ahead of it in a few of the tests (C-Ray, DuckDB, PyBench, FLAC) but in even more of them the M4 is at the bottom of the stack. (Only a third of those charts are actually performance; each performance chart is followed by two power consumption charts.)
And the ~20W TDP is a nice parlor trick (the HX 370 is the only one on the list that competes with it there) but in a desktop CPU that's pretty irrelevant. Whereas if you compare it to the CPUs that can be had for a similar price (e.g. Ryzen 9700X, 65W), it's only ahead in C-Ray and FLAC while losing quite badly in most of the others and subjecting you to unupgradable soldered memory that the PC hardware doesn't.
Meanwhile doing ray tracing on a CPU instead of a GPU isn't much fun, and FLAC is an audio codec so a ~10% improvement there is probably not going to be a big part of your day if you're not a full-time sound engineer. So does averaging those kinds of things in to make a single benchmark number make sense? Or should you be looking at the results on applications you actually use?