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Ahead of Apple’s March Eventthere had been rumours about a new mac mini but no one was expecting the company to introduce an entirely new Mac. Yet that’s what we’ve got: a compact desktop computer that’s designed for heavy-duty workloads.
The design owes a lot to the mini. It’s built from a single aluminium extrusion and has the same 197mm square footprint. It’s also sold in a similarly minimal package, with no keyboard or mouse, nor even any cables save for a power lead. At 95mm it’s more than twice as tall as the mini – to the point where some people think it looks ugly and boxy – but it’s still tiny compared to a typical desktop workstation. That’s partly thanks to how Apple’s M1 architecture integrates CPU, GPU and memory onto a single chip. You’re not going to get a windows machine with this level of performance in such a compact chassis.
Ultra power
This isn’t just a normal M1 processor, either. The base model of the Mac Studio uses the powerful M1 Max processor, with ten CPU cores, 24 GPU cores, 32GB of integrated RAM and a 512GB SSD. We’ve already seen what this chip can do: in the latest revision of the MacBook Pro (see issue 328, p58) it delivers multicore performance that was around 80% faster than the standard M1.
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