What’s the M1 mac mini like for Machine Learning?

by jarl-ragnar on 12/27/2021, 7:44:50 PM with 3 comments
I’m contemplating the M1 mac mini as a ML machine and was wondering what experience others have had with it.

  • by garbagecoder on 12/27/2021, 10:08:04 PM

    I have been playing around with the M1 Pro for compute by making some toys that take advantage of its hardware directly, mostly in arm64 asm and c. I won’t pretend I was able to get every cycle optimized—I’m still working on the code—but it’s great so far.

  • by mark_l_watson on 12/27/2021, 9:19:04 PM

    I have a M1 MacBook Pro, and it is alright for running TensorFlow.

    I have two conda environments set up, tf (CPU), and tf_m1 (Apple silicon GPU, CPU).

    Some of my TF models, mainly multiple rower models have to run on just the CPU, but most of my models use the GPU.

  • by PaulHoule on 12/27/2021, 7:53:09 PM

    What I have read is that the M1 is fast and efficient to train small models w/ Tensorflow but NVIDIA wins for big models.