How far can you push M1?

I use an M1 Mac mini with 16GB of unified memory and 2TB of storage. I got it last month and have been using it as my primary work machine. This is the device that I use for all of my professional video editing work, Fusion 360, audio work, also how I manage all of my cloud hosting servers, and the occasional game on the side.

I have a pretty intensive workflow that I need to push my computer a lot for. So far, the Mac mini has not let me down. I have been able to push the limits of my software before the computer itself began to slow down or run out of resources.

I later wondered, how far can you actually push M1 until you can't push it any farther?

I started to load some of my most resource demanding applications and files, things like multiple 4K streams running in Final Cut Pro at a time, layers and layers and layers of audio streams running in Logic Pro, complex and large Blender scenes, a few games like Minecraft, CS:GO, Ultimate Chicken Horse, and Crab Game. When maxing out all my settings on all of the games and apps, I was starting to push the CPU, but it was not close to the limit of what it could handle.

So I started doing things like setting the Minecraft render distance to the maximum 32 chunks and loading in a large part of the map. Minecraft alone was using over 9GB of ram at this point. Blender was using about 2GB of memory, and other things were of course pushing the RAM. You would expect that the computer would start to slow down or even crash at this point. But no, Apple has some tricks up their sleeves when it comes to RAM management that even though there is only 16GB of RAM and there is more than 16GB worth of apps using memory, it does not fill up. Apple has the ability to compress RAM the same way you would do with a ZIP file, where you can shrink the file sizes down into something smaller. This is what Apple is also able to do with RAM, applications, and other things running in the background. But they have one more trick, and that is the ability to use the SSD as a RAM overflow. When you don't have enough RAM for all of the apps that are using memory at the same time, Apple will begin to use the internal SSD as a temporary RAM stick and to store things like background tasks or other tasks that are not actively being used. This allows for more things to run at one time without the system freezing or crashing.

While you can max out the RAM, it is very difficult. What about the CPU and GPU? With enough apps open in the background, I was able to max out the CPU on both the performance and high efficiency cores with a maximum temperature of 170ºF, according to Macs Fan Control. When the CPU and GPU begin to slow down, it is more noticeable, and while things like moving windows around and flipping back and fourth between pages will work fine, whenever you try and do something like load a webpage, it will take much longer to load than normal, if not timing out the connection.

But what did it take to get there? Well let’s break down the list of things that were running and what they where doing in the background while I was conducting this experiment. This list is in no particular order, but just what was open.

-Minecraft, running maxed-out settings on an amplified world

-Crab Game, running max settings at 100FPS in a private lobby

-CS:GO, maxed out settings sitting in the lobby

-Blender, classroom blend open but not rendering

-Final Cut Pro, 5 4K 60FPS Streams of footage playing in real time

-Logic Pro, 127 layers with effects and everything loading in real time

-safari, 10 tabs of slowhotcomputer.com

-Email

-Maps

-Photos

-Messages

-FaceTime

-Zoom, not in a meeting

-Calendar

-Contacts

-Reminders

-OBS, Recording this experiment

-Notes

-Apple Music

-Keynote, in a presentation

-Numbers, with a large spreadsheet open

-Pages, a 30 page document open

-App Store

-System Preferences

-Find My

-Activity monitor

-Macs Fan Control

-Twitter for Mac

-Xcode with a large app running in simulator for iPhone 13 pro

-Unity

-Fusion 360, project open

That’s a large number of apps to be open and running on a computer, and most people are never going to have this much open at one time. This is the normal M1 chip, not M1 Pro, Max, or Ultra. This is the same chip that can also be found in the 13" MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, iPad Pro, and iPad Air.