I jumped on the Apple Silicon bandwagon, with a “M2 Max” 12 CPU/38 GPU laptop. Below I’ll add some benchmarks I run over time and see how it fares against my Mac Mini, with an i7-8700B processor. This computer is also running an AMD 6800XT graphic card, with 12 GB of GDDR5, which is pretty strong by itself.

Benchmark #1: Building this website

First comparative benchmark is running hugo with the default parameters on my website’s folder, basically one site pass. This excludes thumbnails generation and syncing the site to the server.

Benchmark #2: Stable Diffusion Image Generation

I’ve used a local installation of Stable Diffusion, using AUTOMATIC1111’s web UI, a browser interface for Stable Diffusion based on Gradio library.

In my test, I’ve used sdxlTurboUnstable_v10TURBOEDITION.safetensors [6d5732c731] model to replicate the settings for this image, on a 1024x1024 resolution.

Benchmark #3: Video Exporting in iMovie

I know there’s better video editing software out there, but for the videos I compile, iMovie is more than enough. In order to test the export speed, I’ve tested on an already existing project I had saved, a short movie from Ilinca and Andrei’s wedding. The movie itself is about 14 minutes long, and the export setting was Resolution: 4K, Quality: High, Compress: Better Quality

Benchmark #4: Converting DVD and Bly-Ray dumps to MKV

Another small test I thought of was to convert a DVD or a Blu-Ray to an MKV container, so I could use it in Plex. For this, I used MakeMKV,which is very easy to use. Space wasn’t an issue, so I went for the default option, as the resulting MKV file is not too different in size than the original image, so I didn’t want to reconvert/recompress the video.

Converting a DVD ISO to MKV takes about the same time on both systems, 7-8 seconds, due to the small amount of data that needs to be read and processed (4.27GB). My Mac Mini has a pretty fast SSD, and it looks like the SSD from the laptop is slower. But this might just be a fluke, explained below.

Because of the inconclusive results, I decided to convert a Bly-Ray ISO as well, as its higher file size should be able to make a difference (41.97GB), and I was able to observe a few things, the most important being the M2 SSD getting constant disk reads of 887M/s, as opposed to 334M/s in the case of the 2017 i7 Mac Mini.

This is still a work in progress and I will update this post from time to time when I think of more ways to benchmark this in real life, not using skewed benchmarking tools that output numbers that don’t mean shit.