Oooo new M2 mini's..what do they mean for us?
We were getting ready to upgrade our MacMini when Apple dropped the new models.
I assume the M2 will outperform the M1, and certainly our old Intel mini. I wonder though:
When comparing:
Apple M2 chip
- 8-core CPU with 4 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores
- 10-core GPU
- 16-core Neural Engine
- 100GB/s memory bandwidth
vs
Apple M2 Pro chip
- 10-core CPU with 6 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores
- 16-core GPU
- 16-core Neural Engine
- 200GB/s memory bandwidth
Is the M2 pro a "Must have" vs the normal M2?
Or is it less.. more like "yes, it's nice but not super important"?
Or maybe some other difference I don't know...
I figure that this will be a common question, and one to help the awesome configurator here:
Comments
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As robust as even the original M1 Mac mini was for security camera purposes, I can't see the M2 Pro as a "must have" by any stretch, especially over the already-a-little-better M2.
But of course, it all depends on your usage. If you are going to be running a lot of 8mp cameras with lost of processing, etc, it might make sense.
Even the original M1 covered SO MANY use cases extremely well, though, and the base M2 should be even a little better still. So for security camera purposes, anyone who genuinely needs the M2 Pro over the M2 is likely in a pretty small group I would think.
But of course, logic doesn't make me not want it. :)
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Having an M1 Mac Mini with 16 gigs of RAM right now, I'll keep what I have :-). Maybe an "M3" in a couple more years....
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Yep.. we're coming off a 2014 Intel Mac Mini as we add cameras.
Hence the "M2" or "M2 Pro" ... what kind of benefit would SecuritySpy gain in the "pro" part.
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As I understand it, one other big change from a base M1 machine to an M2 (ANY M2) is that the base M2 now includes the "media engine" that on the M1 series was only in the Pro and better models. Of course the M2 Pro and Max also have it, too.
This "engine" is for video encode and decode, presumably even better than what the M1 could do on its own. (Although I thought it already had hardware decoding in it? Maybe the "media engine" is a more robust version of that? Perhaps Ben can clarify?)
The Mac Studio or MacBook Pro M1 all have this, so their benchmarks on the frame rate calculator page should reflect this.
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We are very excited about these M2 minis!
The basic M1 is a fantastic chip that provides great performance across CPU, GPU, memory, and neural engine - all of which are great for SecuritySpy. On Intel Macs, the main performance bottlenecks were decoding/encoding video, and running the neural networks (SecuritySpy's AI object detection algorithms). On Apple Silicon, running the neural net is now so fast (2ms per image vs. 60ms on the fastest Intel Mac), that this isn't going to be a bottleneck anymore for the vast majority of systems.
What is still often a bottleneck, and therefore the most important performance metric for SecuritySpy, is the Mac's ability to decode (and, to a lesser extent, encode) H.264/H.265 video data. And, what we saw was that the M1 Pro and Max were a huge step up from the original M1 on this specific performance metric. As @keness correctly points out above, this is most likely due to the inclusion of the Media Engine in these chips. To put some numbers on this, the original M1 is able to decode 4K H.265 video data at around 180 FPS in hardware (i.e. with little or no CPU usage), whereas the M1 Max can achieve over 600 FPS in hardware. This is the main reason why a Mac Studio (M1 Max) running SecuritySpy can handle so many more cameras than a Mac mini (M1).
Early video processing performance metrics we have for the M2 are promising - similar to the M1 Max. But we'll need to do more testing to confirm this and to add these machines to our calculator.
We don't know yet whether the M2 Pro is going to be significantly better at this specific task. Possibly not - we will report back when we know for sure. But the extra CPU cores and faster memory certainly can't hurt!
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If the base M2 is capable of decoding at 600+ FPS, and actually is the affordable monster I'm hoping it is, I look forward to learning how the amount of RAM will affect its performance.
The base model is available with 8, 16 or 24 GB Ram, at $599, $799 or $999, respectively.
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Following up here.. we ended up going the M2 Pro route (10 cores.. (6 performance and 4 efficiency), with 32GB Memory)
First thing I did was submit the Video Codec test results. :-)
This machine is wicked-fast, it'd be interesting though to see if the "Max" moniker did as much for the M2 line as it did for the M1 series.
