In anyone’s opinion, which option is better for heavy-plugin (100-200), heavy-track (50-100), multi-hour editing in Ardour 8?
A 2013 Mac Pro, 3.5GHz 6-Core Xeon E5 processor, with 32GB 1866 MHz RAM and an SSD.
(-the “trashcan” one-)
A 2020 3.2GHz 8-core M1 Mac Mini, but with only 8GB (onboard) RAM.
Thanks,
-J
Benchmarks are not the be-all-and-end-all but indications are, there’s not that much in it between these two CPUs.
In some benchmarks the M1 is better, in others the Xeon E5-1650 v2 wins. The aggregate perfomance scores I have seen suggest the Xeon E5-1650 v2 edges it, but I don’t think this is necessarily representative of Ardour usage.
But I suspect that, in Ardour usage, there may not be much in it.
In which case, I would go with the machine with more memory.
Cheers,
Keith
hahaha
Geez, that chart with the “EPYC 9655P” processor on the right-hand side (96-cores!) 
makes anything else look like literal trash… 
It’s like comparing the thrust of some Ferrari’s to that of a SpaceX Raptor engine.
Anyway, thanks for your input!
And I agree about the RAM…
I don’t care what the AI-God says about the ‘M1’s efficient use of the 8GB of RAM’.
-Just seems too little, but what do I know…
I can get both for around $350 each, which is pretty decent.
Still weighing all my options here… 
The RAM efficiency on the M1 is, as I understand it, relating to speed, not of usage.
The M1 is “more efficient” all round, meaning that it achieves good performance with less power consumption. But that doesn’t mean it’s more powerful.
Cheers,
Keith
Not exactly.
It is a combination both of efficiency of usage of the OS, as well as use of a very high speed swap with the built in storage controller. As a result it is a bit more efficient with RAM usage, but trades off as well by increasing wear on the SSD, but how big a deal this is depends on who you ask. Most of the time though I think it should be fine these days, and I have been abusing a 16GB M1 doing things I would never be able to touch in 16GB on Windows (Would need probably 32GB on Windows for the same performance) for many years now. IN fact there is a thread discussing the 8GB vs 16GB somewhere around here and describing some of what I do if people are interested.
I haven’t ever run the 8GB version, but I don’t hesitate to recommend the 16GB Apple Silicon myself and it is very impressive what you can do with those. So if the option was between the Intel and the 16GB M1, I would easily vote the 16GB M1 based off my experience with them, but obviously some people have had less than ideal experiences with the 8GB so it is harder for me to say on that.
Seablade