With lockdown continuing in the UK, and working from home, I decided to look once more at the mechanical keyboard market.
I had been using the Logitech K350 on Windows without any issues, but for whatever reason, I wasn’t able to use this nicely on the Mac - I’d often get drop outs or lag, where what I was typing wasn’t picked up, or was lost completely 1.
In the mean time, I’d been using a Windows Dell keyboard - a cheap and cheerful keyboard that did the job, and I actually wasn’t getting RSI by using it!
I wanted to compare the performance per watt of the new M1 Mac mini against that of my Ryzen 1600X powered gaming PC. To throw some additional items in there, I also measured my Ryzen 4300U little Windows office PC as well and my Raspberry Pi 4.
The speed of the new M1 Mac has shown that Apple’s move to Apple Silicon has been a good move for them. Benchmarks show that it’s faster than some of the Intel and AMD machines.
So whenever I get a new machine, I always run an FDS benchmark on it - purely for fun and comparative purposes. I’ll often run it, even on a machine that isn’t likely to run FDS in a normal situations, such as the M1T Mini PC and Raspberry Pi.
So with the M1 Mac Mini, there was no reason not to run the benchmarks as well. However, as the M1 Mac is based on an ARM based chip, I wasn’t expecting it to perform that well - after all, it would be running on the Mac using Rosetta 2, as FDS is compiled for x86 processors1.