there we go 10 gig networking on an M1
Mac Mini that's just wow or well maybe
the thing is just because a port is present on your computer doesn't mean
that it will operate at full speed and it certainly doesn't mean it will
operate at full speed all the time USB for example is rated by the speed that
is shared across multiple ports high-speed IO and SSD slots often share
resources meaning that both of them will slow down if you use them simultaneously
and in the early days of gigabit networking basically no motherboards
could run those ports at full speed because they were connected to the
lethargic PCI bus you know the old
non-express PCI bus of course we only
know these things because vendors like Intel publish block diagrams of their
platforms to help us understand their capabilities apple on the other hand
does No Such Thing meaning that if there are internal bottlenecks the only way to
find out about them is to have your performance drop while you're in the middle of doing something that makes
today's adventure interesting for two reasons one it'll tell us if Apple
delayed this version of the M1 mini perhaps over performance concerns and
two it might give us some fresh new insight into the black box that is
Apple's M1
so the M1 Max Mac Mini blew us away not just with its performance but also with
its price it beat out every previous Intel Mac and single threaded benchmarks
and ayzen 5 5600x one of the fastest
singlethread desktop CPUs in the market all without breaking the bank it didn't
have the cores to back that up in heavily multi-threaded tasks but so far
that hasn't generated many if any user complaints thanks to m1's tight
integration with macOS and of course the availability of the Mac Pro if you
really need more horses what has generated complaints is the io with just
two USBS two Thunderbolt ports and a
single 1 GB Ethernet Jack m1's mobile
pedigree seemed to be holding it back for people like me who love the CPU
performance but need to work with heavy video footage or other shared resources
over a network if one gig wasn't enough you had to use a bulky expensive dongle
and use up one of your Thunderbolt ports or you had to buy into a deadend Intel
platform which was so disappointing for
me personally after seeing Apple push 10
gig forward over the last few years first with the iMac Pro then with the
Mac Mini but it turns out I just didn't have enough faith in my hand right now
is a shiny new 10 gig version of the M1
Mac Mini and we're going to be running I perf on it as a server to give us full
control over what other ports or devices might be hogging PCI Express bandwidth
causing potential bottlenecks so to start we're running an absolute best
case scenario here with nothing plugged into it other than networking and power
not even our display let's come over here and have a look that is dang that
is pretty stable 9.25
9.45 gigabits per second not too shabby
cuz remember guys 10 gbit is the line
speed and it's perfect ly normal for the actual data speed to be a bit lower
what's not normal is the price for our 40 o water bottles on LTT Store.com
they're the same as 21 Oz what a deal now let's up the ante and connect a pro
display xdr but vus you might ask why would
plugging in a monitor affect how much bandwidth is left over for something
like high-speed networking I'm so glad you asked the M1
Mac Mini is notable for being the first mini with DSC or display stream
compression and what that does is it allows it to have enough leftover
bandwidth to run the integrated USB 3 Hub on this monitor at full speed
previous Intel-based Mac minis ended up running either not at the full 6K
resolution or in an uncompressed tiled
mode that some users have reported actually took this Hub and knocked it
all the way back to USB 2 speeds that's because
uncompressed this monitor will suck up about 34 gigabits per second of
bandwidth to be clear I'm not actually expecting this to throttle our network
speed it's just an excellent illustration of how a system has a
finite amount of resources that needs to be carved up also now that we've got our
display up you can see that the terminal on our mini matches our SSH session so
no smoking mirrors here ladies and Gentlemen let's go ahead and again shall
we and add as expected we are exactly
the same I mean no computer manufacturer
in their right mind would rate the speed of their ports assuming that no display
is plugged in especially not a display they make
right but we're going to kick things up
a notch and to do so Anthony repurposed some of a shell script that he wrote
previously that constantly writes data to an SSD and then spits out speed info
at regular intervals for graphing purposes and and he targeted it at this
high performance Thunderbolt SSD maybe
with this thing running we'll finally start to see some bandwidth sharing in
our I perf test all right Apple all
right I'm impressed our SSD right now is pulling
over 10 gbits per second in reads putting us darn close to the up to 40
gbits per second number that's advertised for these ports but all that tells us so far is
that the two Thunderbolt ports don't share bandwidth so let's continue
remember the USB hub I mentioned on the back of the pro display xdr well we're
going to load it up with USBC ssds we're
going to run that SSD script on all three of these at the same time then
we're going to run our Network test and see if we can make this poor Mac Mini
cry and good news sort of our ssds did
slow down that means we managed to find a
bottleneck but it's in the USB hub of the pro display xdr which present us
with a couple of problems number one that doesn't actually tell us anything
about internal bottlenecks of the M1 Mac Mini and number two is we are fresh out
of USBC ports to plug ssds
into unless a Thunderbolt dock ah yes we need
a Thunderbolt Dock and and more
ssds we're going to plug all these in
and then we're going to run the script on them and then see how you like that
there we go five ssds plugged into the
Hub and then for good measure an
additional one another Thunderbolt 3 one plugged into the Thunderbolt daisy
chain guys if that 10 gig Ethernet is
stealing bandwidth from somewhere we are going to find it huh our pre-planning
did not have this actually go down at all we figured it out one of the discs
was not showing up properly and running the command to a missing Target was
causing something um I don't know maybe
some kind of CPU overhead anyway now
that all the discs are showing up we are getting the results we expected which is
anywhere from 9.3 to 9.42 gbit per
second and this is even with all of the drives running the CPU usage while we're
just doing this is around 18% and that's with the all the drives plugged in if I
add that drive that's not plugged iner what's our CPU usage at now
32 36 significantly higher
interesting I didn't test this on the bench I didn't even expect this okay
it's gone 40
77 okay wow way to way to write a script
that hurts computers when you do it wrong but while
our side Adventure was interesting you know hey turns out runaway CPU usage is
going to affect network transfer performance it wasn't really the point
of the video today so let's refocus and talk about what we've learned so far
there's a few things actually so one we now know that the 10 gig M1 is legit
legit nonshared 10 gig no switch chips
no controller hubs just a whole Gen 4 PCI Express Lane That's why nothing that
we did was able to bottleneck it so clearly Apple's delay had nothing to do
with performance and you can buy this puppy with confidence that's cool but
we're not done diving deeper while our
theoretical Max Speed when testing the drives individually works out to just
over 58 gbits per second it capped out
somewhere around 50 in the real world and that means that we did throttle
somewhere the ssds connected to the pro display xdr were obviously going to
throttle as they were being crowded by that chunky 13.7 GB per second display
port signal but the Thunderbolt 3 hubs
throttling is another story and this one
comes primarily down to the fact that each Thunderbolt 3 Port appears to be
capping out at around 20 to 22 gbits per
second but hang on a second lonus said
each of these ports could do up to 40 gbit per second and you said they didn't
share bandwidth what gives okay so remember how our 10 gig
Nick is expected to be less than 10 gbit per second in the real world well the
same is actually true for Thunderbolt 3 USB 4 whatever the hell this thing is so
around 7.6 gbit per second of that is
set aside for DisplayPort which our Thunderbolt 3 doc has and then the rest
of it gets eaten up by the signal encoding bringing us down to a theoretical maximum of only around 26
gbits per second and that's close enough to our numbers that the difference
probably comes down to the fact that we're going through busy hubs rather
than attaching directly hence the wavy patterns on the graphs compared to the
individual Drive results that means that if you've got applications that are
sensitive to IO variants like audio or
anything involving real-time data you would do best to directly attach or use
only one high-speed device on a hub or dock at a time of course for most people
this is academic and it won't make a difference in the real world well sort
of because M1 is still IO limited and it
has affected the port options on Apple's M1 products like for example the new
iMac which we'll be reviewing so make sure you're subscribed the question just
becomes how limited is it what it looks
like is we've got two PCI Express Gen 4 Lanes going to Apple's Thunderbolt
control which Steeps down to two Thunderbolt 3 channels then we've got one gen 4 Lane
for the 10 gig Nick there's 10 gbits to go around for the type A ports so that's
another Lane that is maybe shared with the Wi-Fi 6 adapter and then there's an
HDMI port connected directly to the GPU via an internal DisplayPort to HDMI
converter that's your IO four lanes accounted for we ran the io terminal
command to try and find out for sure but while it does show device hierarchies it
doesn't show how they're connected to the main system just that they are
connected of course most PC systems have
a lot more than four PCI Express Lanes
surely M1 does as well then right well
not necessarily you might think it would have another four lanes at least for its
SSD but it doesn't remember how the t2
chip that we loved so much was the storage controller for the final
generation of Intel Max and then it just
disappeared with the M1 well the reverse engineering effort for getting M1
running on Linux has actually discovered that Apple wasn't kidding the M1 so has
its security chip built right into it and it's controlling the SSD directly
through some kind of memory map Arrangement not through PCI Express and
you got to remember NVMe is a protocol
so while we associate it with PCI Express it doesn't technically have to
run over PCI Express all of which is to say then that the M1 Mac Mini is
probably near the limits of what Apple can manage with the
m1c but it's got far more IO than we
initially gave it credit for cuz remember we haven't even accounted yet
for whatever bus they're using for the internal GPU so the reason they held off
on the 10 gig version was probably more to do with Logistics or strategy but
whatever it was Apple has done a lot here with little and that's pretty
admirable kind of like how Apple used to be back in the good old days and kind of
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so thanks for watching guys check out our review of the M1 Mac Mini when it
first launched to get just a little bit more of an appreciation for how much of
a game changer this modest piece of silicon could be