Intel Mac Mini for BBCSO

Drew

I'm am planning to get a new Intel Mac Mini for BBCSO. I have Core right now and might upgrade to Pro later. How important is it to have the i7 processor? It's a 200 dollar upgrade. If the i5 can run it fine in Logic Pro, then I would rather spend more on a storage upgrade. Is the i5 good enough or should I get the i7?

Marc

I bought the i7 2019 Mac Mini and went to OWC and installed 64GB of RAM in it. Those extra cores and threads most certainly help. The more processing resources Logic Pro has the easier it is on the overall project and number of channel strips you're running.

Logic Pro is a C/C++/ObjC++ based application. Grand Central Dispatch optimized and loves cores/threads to spread out the load across. It also leverages features from FPGAs on the M series that

Look to purchasing a system that maintains performance for 3-5 years. In five years you'll be dealing with Mx series only options and they better have much greater than 16GB unified memory or even Logic will grind to a halt. The more advanced DAWs become the demanding on resources and no amount of FGPA/Neural Net, cores inside the SoC [System on a Chip] will be able to compensate w/o a much larger amount of unified memory made available.

I cannot stress more getting the i7 upgrade and putting in 64GB enough. You'll be so glad you did. Memory right now is $317.99 for two sticks. There are a few high quality videos to discover on YouTube about swapping out memory. Other than about 15 minutes to go through the steps and some deft skills I suggest you buy the Memory Kit Install Tool Kit from OWC as well. It's indispensable in making the upgrade painless.

On a side note:

The Mac Pro demo of a full blown orchestra Apple demoed when the 2019 model was released in all it's performance with Afterburner and MPX modules for GPGPUs showed how a fully accelerated 28 core/56 thread system with Afterburner handles hundreds of channel strips.

Too bad Apple didn't embrace AMD Zen, and I speak as an Apple Engineering alum. The Zen 4 has an addressable 4TB of DDR5 memory support coming out in early 2022 and models will have 16-96 Cores and 32-192 threads options. Plus with the Xilinx merger the fanfare Apple displayed with the Neural Engine, Machine Learning, etc., are industry leading solutions as part of the IP from Xilinx. AMD is merging these technologies into their future Zen designs and AMD Infinity Fabric 3.0 and beyond is a unified memory architecture between the CPUs/GPUs/FPGAs/DSPs, etc. At 4TB for Zen 4 unified with Multiple Chip on Chip GPGPUs and specialty Xilinx dedicated processors, the future of x86 is far from over.

AMD announced their merger after Apple released the ARM M demos and future of Apple. I can only imagine that was a curve ball for the executive teams. I look forward to seeing what really transpires in 5 years form now to see the dust settle and how Apple has moved forward with their architecture plans, including whether to roll back and focus the ARM solely in the Auto and embedded spaces they so well have managed to own.