SillyDog701

[Pu7o]

Today Apple has announced the Intel Mac Mini. The new Mac mini will ship in two different configurations. The chips included in the models are respectively the Intel 1.5GHz Core Solo and the Intel 1.67 Core Duo.

Among other upgrades are the inclusion of four USB ports (as opposed to the original two), Front Row, 1GBit Ethernet, built-in Bluetooth and AirPort Extreme, and the ability to connect your Mac to your television.

Unfortunately, the Mac Mini also had a downgrade: The Radeon 9200 card from the PowerPC models has been replaced with a less powerful Intel Integrated Graphics card. According to a person who owned the Apple Intel DTK, which had one such card, "it's a disgrace - from experience with the DTK you really can't play games on it at all".

A new capability with the new Mac Mini that will be incorporated to the iMac as well is the possibility of streaming video through iTunes.

The cheapest Mac Mini will cost $599 (US) and the less cheap one will cost $799 (US).

(Thanks Antony for information about the 1GBit Ethernet and the built-in Bluetooth and AirPort Extreme).

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[Antony]

The ability to connection directly to TV via S-video or Composite Video requires optional Apple DVI to Video Adapter.

Both models come with 512MB of 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM (PC2-5300), supports up to 2GB.

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[Mandrake]

Unfortunately, the Mac Mini also had a downgrade: The Radeon 9200 card from the PowerPC models has been replaced with a less powerful Intel Integrated Graphics card. According to a person who owned the Apple Intel DTK, which had one such card, "it's a disgrace - from experience with the DTK you really can't play games on it at all".

The Intel GMA 950 wouldn't be any slower than the ancient Radeon 9200 model with a limiting 32mb ram. Most likely they're about equal.

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[Antony]

sorry for the advertisement, fresh new banner from Apple.

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[Mandrake]

The Intel GMA 950 supports "Core Image" in Mac OS X, which is nice. There's no doubt that it's still an entry level GPU though. Overall this is a nice upgrade, except for the price increase.

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[Antony]

ArsTechnica has a close look on Mac mini (Core Solo), and benchmarks.

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[Antony]

Just a small note about the new Mac mini, you should install RAM in pairs. Otherwise, you will get less speed (internally).

The Intel Mini uses an Intel 945 class chipset, which should support dual-channel memory. This means that if you upgrade the DIMMs in *matched* pairs, you will get up to 10.6 GB/sec of bandwidth between the memory and the system controller (versus a max of 5.3 GB/sec if you were to just use one DIMM).

This extra bandwidth is particularly important since the integrated Intel GMA 950 graphics solution is using system memory as VRAM. So Apple is doing most people a favor by only providing paired DIMMs (though it would be nice if the RAM were officially user serviceable and they provided a "no RAM" option...but no major OEM does that).

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[Antony]

Unfortunately, the Mac Mini also had a downgrade: The Radeon 9200 card from the PowerPC models has been replaced with a less powerful Intel Integrated Graphics card. According to a person who owned the Apple Intel DTK, which had one such card, "it's a disgrace - from experience with the DTK you really can't play games on it at all".

Sorry to bring this up, but I just find additional information on the two different graphic cards.
Although GMA950 is integrated and uses shared memory, it's a relatively advanced model and it's specifically optimised for video playback.
As Mandrake mentioned, GMA950 uses up to 64 MB of DDR2 667MHz memory (compared to Radeon 9200's 32MB DDR 200MHz).

The comparison:
ATI Radeon 9200
Pipelines: 4
Fill rate: 1 gigapixel/second
RAM: 32 MB of DDR 200 MHz
Core speed: 250 MHz
No Core Image

Intel GMA950
Pipelines: 4
Fill rate: 1.6 gigapixel/second
RAM: up to 64 MiB of DDR2 667MHz
Core speed: 400 MHz
Core Image support

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