Mac mini to PC Hack

DiZASTiX writes "Kevin Rose, the ever so popular host of G4/TechTV's The Screen Savers, has managed to fit a PC inside the Mac mini. 'I've seen a ton of articles around the web lately comparing the Mac mini to the near full size desktop PC. What they fail to compare is the amount of computing power per square inch you get with the Mini. So, I decided to take it upon myself to create the fastest PC possible with the size constraints of the Mini's small form factor.' The article covers most everything he did and includes pictures."

Why do *you* bother?

[fm6]

And then there are people who login to Slashdot merely to complain about how boring other Slashdotters are.

Apparently they never heard of the Cappuccino PC

[onelin]

The http://www.cappuccinopc.com/ [cappuccinopc.com] has been out long before the Mac Mini, and the original was even a smaller form-factor, with modern P4 variants just slightly larger.

Anyway, this whole article is missing the point. Cheap OS X is good for everybody! I wouldn't buy a PC that small even though there's the option...

Coincidence?

[Greger47]

The Mac mini box is 16.5 cm along the edges. Compare that to the mini-ITX PC boards that are 17x17 cm.

I guess Apple decided to give all those nerds that insist on "upgrading" their Macs with a PC mobo a challenge. :) /greger

Celeron != G4

[kaan]

The specs you link to show that it has a max processor speed of 500Mhz. The Mac mini goes up to 1.4Ghz. They say that a celeron can go higher, but not 900Mhz higher.

And for sake of argument, even if the the celeron could get itself up 1.4ghz, it would not offer the same actual performance of a G4. This is the age-old argument about the architectures being so different that the clock speeds don't matter, but it cannot be stressed enough. The CISC-based Intel/AMD processors are not as efficient at getting work done as the RISC-based PowerPC processors.

I like the analogy of a person physically moving 1,000 boxes from one side of the house to the other. The CISC person might be able to get from one side to other (and back) in 2 seconds, but each time he does he can only carry a single box with him, so it would take 2,000 seconds to move all boxes. Whereas the RISC person might take 5 seconds to make the same round-trip distance, but each time he can carry 20 boxes, so it takes a total of 250 seconds (5 seconds * 1000 boxes / 20 boxes-per-trip). The numbers I used are not meant to exactly correlate to a Celeron vs. G4, but they convey the right idea - efficiency and speed are not equivalent.

Re:Nah! Let's try something better...

[commodoresloat]

So nobody recalls the Mac original name here?

You mean "Lisa"?

If Macintoshes were ever called McIntoshes, there's no mention of it here [apple-history.com]. I think you're wrong.

I *love* those amplifiers.

Agreed -- my family used to have one of these (and a preamp) years ago. Wish I could afford one. Until following the (audiophile pornography!) link above (and wasting half an hour drooling and clicking), I had no idea they made speakers too.

"expensive apple" becoming a myth

[meza]

Face it people, apple makes cheap and affordable computers in the middle range, and have done for a while. I've been looking especially for a small laptop, around 12". And which one is the cheapest I can find? Thats right, apple ibook. All the other manufactures sell their small laptops as "ultra portable" and takes out a higher price then for their 15". But with apple the 12" laptop is there smalles and thereby cheapest laptop.

I'm not an Apple zealot. The only thing that has brought me into thinking of buying an ibook is the price. But if you have a better deal, please prove me wrong. I really need an affordable small laptop.

You're on the road to hell, boyo

[jet_silver]

That's why I bought my iBook, and because of the iBook I bought a MDD G4. Hell, I figured OSX was just a curiosity, and I ran OpenBSD on the iBook for a while, but then... I had to try OSX... and got hooked. If you start right out with OSX you'll be amazed, like I was when IPhoto recognized my camera without configuring -anything-. That's what did it for me.

Car analogies rarely work, however...

[TheLittleJetson]

I think of Apple as more closely matched to BMW. It's a brand whose primary goal is to build a reliable piece of hardware that is enjoyable to use. It's easy to form an opinion about it, but until you get behind the wheel/screen, you just won't get it Much like BMW, Apple has recently put a lot of effort into aesthetics, and therefore the brand has been making its way into the "luxury" market, while keeping its core goals (quality, enjoyable use) intact.

BMW's aren't the fastest cars on the road, but they're still plenty fast. Anyone with some mechanical skill can turbocharge a Dodge Neon or something and end up with more bang-for-the-buck, but it's just not the same.

...now that that analogy is wearing thin, let me address a couple points...

I'd be surprised if we don't see a PC variant with better specs within a few months. -- Me too! Apple always has a bunch of companies rushing to implement a knock-off of it's current design. (I'm not saying that Apple never takes other peoples ideas, I'm simply saying that when they announce something big/cool, other companies copy it in droves. There are too many examples to list, but here's a few: System7, iPod, Titanium PowerBook, etc.)

Other than the SFF community who are they targeting? Are most Mac/PC users going to give up significant amounts of horsepower to save a couple inches of space? -- I don't think the Mac mini is meant to be the fastest, most upgradable machine they have. In fact, I would speculate that most people buying a Mac mini are buying it as a second computer. I think it has 2 target markets, one of which is more important than the others:

• The important one: non-mac users who are flirting with the idea of switching. Maybe they use Macs at work or school, and a PC at home. Perhaps they have an iPod and iTunes, and enjoy the experience, and want iPhoto, iMovie, iEtc. I think this is the critical target group, because this is like training wheels for the switch to Mac. If they like the Mac experience, they may end up switching, or if they don't divorce the PC, at least they could become a long term Apple customer, possibly buying more Apple products in the future. For this group, processor speed isn't all that important. This computer is just to organize their photos, music, and "digital life". Since the price of entry is so low, it's hard for these folks to say no at this point.
• The other group: those who want a net-appliance. Anyone who may have bought a Cobalt Qube [cobaltqube.org] is probably eyeing the Mac mini right now. A set-top box, a home router/server, etc. It's good for little projects like that. Again, processor speed isn't as important as it would be in other applications.

...they are going to produce their own set top box or game console... -- Apple has a nasty habbit of coming up with ideas a few years before the market is ripe for it. The video game console is no different: at one point they planned to release the Pippin, [theapplecollection.com] which was somewhere between an XBOX and WebTV as far as featureset.... I don't think this ever made it into production.

The guts of a Mac mini

[bonch]

Anyone whose taken apart their mini to upgrade has already seen how remarkably simple and elegant (the classic Mac elitist term, but it applies) the innards are. It's a tight fit, and yet the mini compares performance-wise with any other iBook G4 released last year. I use the 1.42Ghz model with 512MB of RAM, and it is speedier than my somewhat equivalent giant PC tower (the look of which suddenly became obsolete the very day the Mac mini was revealed...it's sad to see the tiny white Mac mini sitting on top of a giant, ugly gray tower from Gateway). I actually use the mini to do multitrack recording at 24-bit/96kHz through Logic Express, and it handles it fine. It's also a blast to program with, even for making UNIX apps if you want to.

You start to wrap your head around it more easily when you start realizing it's really an iBook without the keyboard and LCD, but the fact it's even smaller than a laptop blows your mind. Trying to put a PC in such a size failed--he couldn't even include the CD drive. The mini really is an entire home computer in a tiny box, but the real trick is that it actually doesn't suck. That's what seperates it from the rest--it's a real, usable computer that takes up less space than my laptop yet doesn't suck.

Re:Celeron != G4

[Dixie_Flatline]

Yes, you're right. I think part of the problem is my mis-naming of the terms. Really, what I referred to as CISC should just be called 'Pentium 4', however it does things. From what I understand, it's instruction path is narrow and deep. Very fast, but bad for branch misprediction.

PPC970 (G5) is wide and shallow. Concurrent execution of many instructions, slower, better for branch misprediction.

CISC and RISC don't really have any standout examples any more (from what I know). Both Intel and IBM have hybrid chips that fall strongly into neither category.

Re:Celeron != G4

[ArbitraryConstant]

"And both of them do raw MPEG-2 to Divx/XviD encoding at nearly the same rate."

There's any number of ways performance can be affected. Are you using a codec that's optimized for Altivec but not SSE? Those chips would not demonstrate such a wide performance gap without something slowing the Athlon down.

"The G5 is better however, because of its addressing and memory management (the two areas PC chips were still "winning" in). The only negative is the total GHz for PPC CPUs available is lower."

What exactly is "addressing and memory management"?

G5s have a bus comparable to Pentium 4s, but Athlon64s and Opterons have on-die memory controllers. That gives them significantly better memory performance, particularly better latency. Better than G5s and better than P4s.

Re:You want me because of my .. referral?

[Boiling_point_]

...don't be a smarmy pissant and use the popularity of his work to increase your chances at winning a Mac mini

Although I agree with you, this Kevin Rose chap seems to be actively encouraging [kevinrose.com] exactly those comments.

Pyramid schemes provide benefits to

<acronym title="suckers">participants</acronym>

in inverse proportion to the expontentially growing userbase. There's a finite number of people who will follow you into these things, and only those who get in very early stand a chance of attracting the requisite numbers to receive the pay-off. Plus they've sold their privacy (and their time, when it comes to dealing with the deluge of spam).

For these $FREEITEM offers, there are two groups who stand to lose (and therefore underpin the entire scheme):

1. latecomers who sell their privacy and time for no eventual $FREEITEM (since they can't attract a further ~10 suckers); and
2. the advertisers themselves who spend more on the

   <acronym title="people who just demonstrated they are too cheap to pay for things anyway">qualified sales leads</acronym>

   than they will ever make up in sales conversions.

For those who are interested, and ESPECIALLY those who are considering "buying in" - (the Coral Cache of) Rob Cockerham's entertaining masterpiece on the Herbalife system [nyud.net] should give anyone with half a brain enough warning to walk quickly on by with their hands in their pockets and eyes pointed straight ahead.

Mac Mini PC

[PhaxMohdem]

Looks like a fun project but to me, a 400 mhz slower... inferior processor and no optical drive doesn't seem like a design win to me.

On another note, about building one of these with high end graphics.... People get so focused on off the shelf cards they forget about a whole nother breed of integrated chips.... for laptops..

While I highly doubt the mini-itx standard will suffice in powering an x86 counterpart to the mac mini, a custom designed board with perhaps a radeon mobility 9700 or 9800 chipset would run most of the games Lan partiers play at playable framerates.

To acheive this type of miniaturization with the level of performace as Apple has done, it will NEED a company willing to custom design a laptop board varient to fit a case, that supports such mobile chipsets. Perhaps even the ability to upgrade the mobile graphics card via a slot in the bottom of the unit.

A dothan and a high end mobility graphics card would prove to be a nice little LAN party animal. but then the issue of $$$ comes into play a PC system outperforming the mini for $499 or less??? I highly doubt it.

Apple Mini - 1
PC mini - 0 & Currently TKO'd

Re:Celeron != G4

[Anonymous Coward]

LAME performance for the 3000+ [gamepc.com]

I think you should:

1. Pick a CD at random
2. Rip it into one large WAV file
3. Encode it using LAME on both platforms.
4. Repeat with iTunes on both platforms.
5. Provide the results.

In both cases we'll compare identical encoders, and not LAME x86 vs. iTunes G4. This is to prevent problems stemming from LAME being the highest-quality MP3 encoder, and iTunes being a POS.

Btw, clock-per-clock the Athlon64 is better than the G5. And the Pentium 4 is much better at divx encoding than the AthlonXP.

Re:Who said you can't upgrade a Mac?

[Anonymous Coward]

To me its not about upgrade path, its about price. I spend around 1300-1500 each year on a new computer. With that amount of cash, I can build the biggest AMD/intel based PC I want that is not on the bleeding edge. The cheapest I can get a mac in the same range of speed is around 3000.00 or so my mac wielding friends tell me. They swear its worth it, and I like the UI, but thats still 1500.00 more then I like to spend. People usually counter this by saying the resale value is higher, which might be true, but I tipically dont sell my pc's on ebay. I usually sell them as parts to gamers who want upgrades, and I'm not sure my market would accept a mac.