Up to six CPU cores and superfast I/O make Mac mini the perfect Xcode companion to build your apps at top speed while running automated tests in the background. With up to 6-core processors and faster 2666MHz memory, Mac mini is ideal for batching out massive Xcode builds or rendering and encoding video. And now with even more cores packed into its 7.7-inch-square frame, you never know where you'll find a Mac mini - or dozens of them - hard at work. Or pair Mac mini with an eGPU for desktop-class graphics performance.īecause of its size, performance, and wide array of ports, Mac mini goes where no Mac has gone before. Connect up to two 4K displays - and even a third with HDMI 2.0 - or one 5K display. Thunderbolt 3 gives you some seriously productive possibilities. The new HDMI 2.0 port delivers more bandwidth than its predecessor, so you can enjoy faster frame rates. Thunderbolt 3 is our most powerful and versatile port ever - and Mac mini has four of them. With a variety of ports, Mac mini is ready for a variety of workflow configurations. Here's how it compares to the previous generation.
Mac mini is optimized for performance across the board. The T2 Security Chip consolidates several controllers into one, and includes a Secure Enclave coprocessor that provides the foundation for encrypted storage and secure boot capabilities. Mac mini features the Apple T2 Security Chip - second-generation custom Mac silicon designed by Apple to make Mac mini even more secure. So you can load giant files and launch apps faster than ever. Mac mini now includes all-flash PCIe-based storage, with up to four times the read speeds of previous flash options. And now you can configure even more memory - up to 64GB - to run even heavier workloads. Mac mini features high-performance 2666MHz DDR4 SO-DIMM memory for faster rendering, working with massive files, or running multiple virtual machines. Packing this much power into the same enclosure required an all-new thermal architecture - including all-flash storage, a bigger fan, expanded vents, and a redesigned power supply. So whether you're running a live concert sound engine or testing your latest iOS or iPadOS app, Mac mini is the shortest distance between a great idea and a great result. And now with eighth-generation Intel 6-core processor and Intel UHD Graphics 630, Mac mini has even more compute power for industrial-grade tasks. The Retina MacBook Pro’s Portal 2 tests displayed twice as many frames per second.In addition to being a great desktop computer, Mac mini powers everything from home automation to giant render farms.
Cinebench Open GL tests on the 15-inch 2.6GHz Core i7 Retina MacBook Pro with 500GB flash storage and 8GB of RAM were 70 percent faster than the BTO Mac mini.
And the Mac mini’s GPU was totally overwhelmed by the graphics performance of the 15-inch Retina display MacBook Pros and their discreet nVidia GeForce GT 650M graphics with 1GB of dedicated GDDR5 memory. The BTO Mac mini failed to beat the 2011 high-end Mac mini in Portal 2 and Cinebench Open GL tests.
The scores would’ve been even higher had Apple offered a discreet graphics upgrade alternative to the capable-if somewhat lackluster-Intel HD 4000 integrated graphics. That makes sense, seeing how the high-end 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro has the same 2.6GHz quad-core Core i7 processor as the BTO Mac mini and uses flash storage instead of standard rotational hard drives. The BTO Mac mini’s combination of extra RAM, a speedy SSD, and a quad-core Core i7 processor was so good, its performance earned a Speedmark 8 score just below the 15-inch Retina MacBook Pros. As you can see, our benchmark tests bear that out.
(A Fusion Drive is not Apple’s special implementation of a hybrid drive, which houses a SSD and a hard drive in one mechanism.) Data is written to the SSD first, so the idea is that you get SSD speeds but with the capacity of standard hard drives. Fusion Drive gives you the best of both worlds by bringing together a separate 120GB SSD and 1TB hard drive and presenting them to both the user and applications as a single drive. SSDs are fast as all get out, but they have very limited capacity and they cost a lot more than traditional drives. I’ll dig deeper into the Fusion Drive in my next article, but in brief, Fusion Drive is Apple’s answer to the high-price-per-gigabyte problem of solid-state drives. The BTO Mac mini’s PCMark productivity test score (using VMWare Fusion) was three times higher than the high-end standard configuration’s score. The standard configuration $799 Mac mini with its 5400-rpm hard drive took more than three times as long to complete our copy file and uncompress file tests as the Fusion Drive did in the BTO Mac mini. But it was the Fusion Drive that really kicked the BTO Mac mini into overdrive.