[HN Gopher] Why E cores make Apple silicon fast
___________________________________________________________________
Why E cores make Apple silicon fast
Author : ingve
Score : 218 points
Date : 2026-02-08 11:31 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (eclecticlight.co)
(TXT) w3m dump (eclecticlight.co)
| tyleo wrote:
| These processors are good all around. The P cores kick butt too.
|
| I ran a performance test back in October comparing M4 laptops
| against high-end Windows desktops, and the results showed the
| M-series chips coming out on top.
|
| https://www.tyleo.com/blog/compiler-performance-on-2025-devi...
| murderfs wrote:
| This is likely more of a Windows filesystem benchmark than
| anything else: there are fundamental restrictions on how fast
| file access can be on Windows due to filesystem filter drivers.
| I would bet that if you tried again with Linux (or even in
| WSL2, as long as you stay in the WSL filesystem image), you'd
| see significantly improved results.
| philistine wrote:
| Which still wouldn't beat the Apple Silicon chips. Apple
| rules the roost.
| Kuinox wrote:
| https://www.cpubenchmark.net/laptop.html
| philistine wrote:
| You click on laptop and somehow that's a gotcha, I click
| on single thread and the M5 is at the very top. What is
| that?
| Kuinox wrote:
| You are seeing basically the lithography node used to
| make the CPU. Since Apple books more capacity than anyone
| else, they have their chip 5-6 months ahead of the
| market, you'll see chips with similar performance by
| core.
| philistine wrote:
| And what about the M3 Ultra, that sits at number 3 and
| came out ten months ago? Why was it not beaten five
| months ago? Might I add that the M3 Ultra is on an older
| node than the M5. And what about the A19 Pro, which is
| better at single core than every desktop chip in the
| world, and happens to be inside a phone!
|
| Apple has the best silicon team in the world. They choose
| perf per watt over pure perf, which means they don't win
| on multi-core, but they're simply the best in the world
| in the most complicated, difficult, and impossible metric
| to game: single core perf.
| Kuinox wrote:
| It's bench score on single thread is 0.6% better than the
| Intel Core Ultra 9 285K, which have a lower TDP and was
| released 6 months before. Boths use the same lithography
| node. If you look at the chip by their lithography node,
| the Apple silicons are the same than the others...
| SR2Z wrote:
| Apple's M-series chips are fantastic, but I do agree with
| you that it's mostly a combination of newer process and
| lots of cache.
|
| Even when they were new, they competed with AMD's high
| end desktop chips. Many years later, they're still
| excellent in the laptop power range - but not in the
| desktop power range, where chips with a lot of cache
| match it in single core performance and obliterate it in
| multicore.
|
| https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-apple_m4-vs-
| amd_ry...
| bitwize wrote:
| But at the end of the day, the fact is the best gear is
| made by Apple.
| Kuinox wrote:
| It depends at which point in time and what you consider
| is the best gear.
| hu3 wrote:
| maybe. But then you have to use macOS which by far not
| the best OS
| cubefox wrote:
| Here is a more recent comparison with Intel's new Panther Lake
| chips: https://www.tomsguide.com/computing/cpus/panther-lake-
| is-int...
| sys_64738 wrote:
| Are the Intel systems plugged in when running those tests?
| Usually when Apple machines do the tests then the difference
| between battery/plugged in is small if any.
| dagmx wrote:
| Which still come out behind other than multi core, while
| using substantially more power.
|
| Those panther lake comparisons are from the top end PTL to
| the base M series. If they were compared to their comparative
| SKUs they'd be even further behind.
| cubefox wrote:
| The article said the M5 has significantly higher single
| core CPU performance, Panther Lake has significantly higher
| GPU performance. The Panther Lake devices had OLED screens,
| which consume significantly more power than LCDs, so they
| were at a disadvantage.
|
| This was all mentioned in the article.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| So useless for what most laptops are used - working
| dagmx wrote:
| Again, the Panther Lake devices here are the top end of
| Panther lake comparing against the base level M5.
|
| See the chart here for what the intel SKUs are:
| https://www.pcworld.com/article/3023938/intels-core-
| ultra-se...
|
| They consume more power at the chip level. You can see
| this in Intels spec sheets. The base recommended power
| envelope of the PTL is the maximum power envelope of the
| M5. They're completely different tiers. You're comparing
| a 25-85W tier chip to a 5W-25W chip.
|
| They also only win when it comes to multi core whether
| that's CPU or GPU. If they were fairly compared to the
| correct SoC (an M4 Pro) they'd come out behind on both
| multicore CPU and GPU.
|
| This was all mentioned in my comment addressing the
| article. This is the trick that apples competitors are
| using, by comparing across SKU ranges to grab the
| headlines. PTL is a strong chip, no doubt, but it's still
| behind Apple across all the metrics in a like for like
| comparison.
| etrvic wrote:
| From your article it seems like you benchmark compile times. I
| am not an expert on the subject, but I don't see the point in
| comparing ARM compilation times with Intel. There are probably
| different tricks involved in compilation and the instructions
| set are not the same.
| tom_ wrote:
| I've often been suspicious of this too, having noticed that
| building one of my projects on Apple Silicon is way quicker
| than I'd expect relative to x64, given relative test suite
| run times and relative PassMark numbers.
|
| I don't know how to set up a proper cross compile setup on
| Apple Silicon, so I tried compiling the same code on 2 macOS
| systems and 1 Linux system, running the corresponding test
| suite, and getting some numbers. It's not exactly conclusive,
| and if I was doing this properly properly then I'd try a bit
| harder to make everything match up, but it does indeed look
| like using clang to build x64 code is more expensive - for
| whatever reason - than using it to build ARM code.
|
| Systems, including clang version and single-core PassMark:
| M4 Max Mac Studio, clang-1700.6.3.2 (PassMark: 5000)
| x64 i7-5557U Macbook Pro, clang-1500.1.0.2.5 (PassMark: 2290)
| x64 AMD 2990WX Linux desktop, clang-20 (PassMark: 2431)
|
| Single thread build times (in seconds). Code is a bunch of
| C++, plus some FOSS dependencies that are C, everything built
| with optimisation enabled: Mac Studio: 365
| x64 Macbook Pro: 1705 x64 Linux: 1422
|
| (Linux time excludes build times for some of the FOSS
| dependencies, which on Linux come prebuilt via the package
| manager.)
|
| Single thread test suite times (in seconds), an approximate
| indication of relative single thread performance:
| Mac Studio: 120 x64 Macbook Pro: 350 x64
| Linux: 309
|
| Build time/test time makes it look like ARM clang is an
| outlier: Mac Studio: 3.04 x64
| Macbook Pro: 4.87 x64 Linux: 4.60
|
| (The Linux value is flattered here, as it excludes dependency
| build times, as above. The C dependencies don't add much when
| building in parallel, but, looking at the above numbers, I
| wonder if they'd add up to enough when built in series to
| make the x64 figures the same.)
| wpm wrote:
| My M4 mini is probably the fastest computer/watt in my home.
| And it was the cheapest.
|
| Not even a bad little gaming machine on the rare occasion
| roomey wrote:
| Genuine question, when people talk about apple silicon being
| fast, is the comparison to windows intel laptops, or Mac intel
| architecture?
|
| Because, when running a Linux intel laptop, even with crowd
| strike and a LOT of corporate ware, there is no slowness.
|
| When blogs talk about "fast" like this I always assumed it was
| for heavy lifting, such as video editing or AI stuff, not just
| day to day regular stuff.
|
| I'm confused, is there a speed difference in day to day corporate
| work between new Macs and new Linux laptops?
|
| Thank you
| newsclues wrote:
| Power management with Mac's is the big benefit, imo.
|
| It's all about the perf per watt.
| cj wrote:
| For me it's things like boot speed. How long does it take to
| restart the computer. To log out, and log back in with all my
| apps opening.
|
| Mac on intel feels like it was about 2x slower at these basic
| functions. (I don't have real data points)
|
| Intel Mac had lag when opening apps. Silicon Mac is instant and
| always responsive.
|
| No idea how that compares to Linux.
| nottorp wrote:
| Hmm? Why do you restart your computer often enough to notice?
|
| Even Windows (or at least my install that doesn't have any
| crap besides visual studio on it) can run for weeks these
| days...
| maccard wrote:
| My work laptop decided probably once a week to not go to
| sleep and just run its battery to 0.
|
| My work PC will decide to not idle and will spin up fans
| arbitrarily in the evenings so I shut it down when I'm not
| using it.
| eru wrote:
| Well, completely rebooting is a lot slower on my Macs than on
| my Linux.
|
| But I'm running a fairly slim Archlinux install without a
| desktop environment or anything like that. (It's just XMonad
| as a window manager.)
| indemnity wrote:
| What hardware? Up until a recent BIOS update my X870 board
| 9950X3D spent 3 minutes of a cold boot training the RAM...
| then booting up the OS in 4-8 seconds, so my Mac would
| always win these comparisons. Now it still takes a while at
| first boot, but subsequent reboots are snappy.
| nerdsniper wrote:
| Windows can boot pretty fast these days, I'm always surprised
| by it. I run LTSC on mine though, so zero bloat. Both my Macs
| and Windows LTSC have quick boots nowadays, I'm not sure I
| could say which is faster, but it might be the Windows.
| spockz wrote:
| It can boot and show a desktop fast after logging in.
| However, after that it seems still to be doing a lot in the
| background. If I try to open up Firefox, or any other app,
| immediately after I see the desktop it will take forever to
| load. When I let the desktop sit for a minute and then open
| Firefox it opens instantly.
|
| Presumably a whole bunch of services are still being
| (lazy?) loaded.
|
| On the other hand, my cachyos install takes a bit longer to
| boot, but after it jumps to the desktop all apps that are
| autostart just jump into view instantly.
|
| Most time on boot seems to be spent on initializing drives
| and finding the right boot drive and load it.
| throwa356262 wrote:
| Some of that can be attributed to faster IO.
|
| Something else to consider: chromebook on arm boots
| significantly faster than dito intel. Yes, nowadays Mediateks
| latest cpus wipe the floor with intel N-whatever, but it has
| been like this since the early days when the Arm version was
| relatively underpowered.
|
| Why? I have no idea.
| ahepp wrote:
| My guess would be that ARM Chromebooks might run
| substantially more cut-down firmware? While intel might
| need a more full-fat EFI stack? But I haven't used either
| and am just speculating.
| jghn wrote:
| > For me it's things like boot speed
|
| This is a metric I never really understood. how often are
| people booting? The only time I ever reboot a machine is if I
| have to. For instance the laptop I'm on right now has an
| uptime of just under 100 days.
| maccard wrote:
| My Mac - couldn't tell you, I just close the lid. My work
| laptop? Probably every day, as it makes its own mind up
| what it does when you close the lid. Even the "shut down"
| button in the start menu often restarts the machine in win
| 11.
|
| My work desktop? Every day, and it takes > 30 seconds to go
| from off to desktop, and probably another minute or two for
| things like Docker to decide that they've actually started
| up.
| n8cpdx wrote:
| Back in the bad old days of Intel Macs, I had a full system
| crash just as I was about to get up to give a presentation
| in class.
|
| It rebooted and got to desktop, restoring all my open
| windows and app state, before I got to the podium (it was a
| very small room).
|
| The Mac OS itself seems to be relatively fast to boot, the
| desktop environment does a good job recovering from
| failures, and now the underlying hardware is screaming
| fast.
|
| I should never have to reboot, but in the rare instances
| when it happens, being fast can be a difference maker.
| smw wrote:
| Apple silicon is very fast per size/watt. The mind blowing
| thing is the macbook air that has weighs very little, doesn't
| have a fan, and feels competitive with top of the line desktop
| pcs.
| eru wrote:
| Of course, it's only competitive for short bursts of serious
| CPU work. The thermal limits do kick in pretty quickly.
|
| (I love my MacBook Air, but it does have its limits.)
| nerdsniper wrote:
| I looked into this for the M1 MBA and it had the exact same
| performance at full load as the MBP...for 7 minutes. Then
| the thermal throttling hits and it slows down. I'm not sure
| what the time limit is for newer models. Regardless, the
| MBA's aren't offered with Pro/Ultra chips, which I desire
| (and would thermally throttle much sooner than 7 minutes).
|
| My recommendation to friends asking about MBP / MBA is
| entirely based on whether they do anything that will load
| the CPU for more than 7 minutes. For me, I need the fans. I
| even use Macs Fan Control[0], a 3rd party utility, to
| control the fans for some of my workflows - pegging the
| fans to 100% to pre-cool the CPU between loads can help a
| lot.
|
| 0: https://crystalidea.com/macs-fan-control
| eru wrote:
| I guess the details depend on how warm it is in your
| room, and whether your MacBook Air sits directly under a
| fan.
| testing22321 wrote:
| I edit tons of raw images and 4K video like it's going
| out of style.
|
| My used M1 mba is the fastest computer I've ever used. If
| a video render is going to take more than 7 minutes I
| walk away or just do something in another app anyway. The
| difference of a few mini means nothing.
| giantrobot wrote:
| I've got a cheap laptop stand with built-in fans that
| blow against the bottom case of my MBA. With my previous
| M1 and current M3 the stand keeps them from thermal
| throttling for longer periods. Most of the time it's
| completely unnecessary but I use it occasionally when
| doing long duration compiles or other long term heavy
| loads. Even without using the stand the tasks would
| complete in a reasonable amount of time, it just gives me
| a few extra minutes of "full blast" which is often all I
| need.
| ahepp wrote:
| what are you doing where you find the thermal limits
| noticeable?
| robertoandred wrote:
| Fortunately, short CPU bursts are most of what most people
| do. Race to idle!
| wincy wrote:
| I've been amazed that while it absolutely uses a ton of
| battery, so has to be plugged in, my kid is able to play 3D
| online games with me using my old M1 MacBook Air. Not top
| of the line stuff (and had to change the resolution to
| 1440x900), but still. It gets hot, but doesn't thermal
| throttle. I had half expected it to start throttling but we
| played for 3 hours last night with no issues.
|
| What's surprising is it DOES throttle using Discord with
| video after an hour or so, unless the battery is already
| full (I'm guessing it tries to charge which generates a lot
| of heat). You get way less thermals with a full battery and
| it using power instead of discharging/charging the battery
| during heavy usage.
| jsheard wrote:
| Apple chips are very good especially for their power envelope
| but let's not get ahead of ourselves, the only way a Macbook
| Air feels competitive with a top-of-the-line desktop is if
| you're not actually utilizing the full sustained power of the
| desktop. There's a reason why Apple sells much bigger
| Max/Ultra chips with active cooling.
| freeone3000 wrote:
| It's still a lot _less_ active cooling - the MBP fan and
| fan noise is noticably less than every thinkpad I've had,
| and its perf beats most desktop i7s.
| drob518 wrote:
| My M1 MacBook Air is honestly the best laptop I've ever
| owned. Still snappy and responsive years after release.
| Fantastic machine. But I'm starting to crave an M5 Air...
| xandrius wrote:
| Don't let consumerism be stronger than you. An m1 is still
| sufficiently powerful.
| drob518 wrote:
| I appreciate your helping to strengthen my resolve. More
| importantly, my wife thanks you as well. That said, the
| increased RAM available on the new models is really what
| I want. I have lots of programs open simultaneously.
| whatevermom3 wrote:
| You deserve an upgrade! You worked so hard for it :)
|
| Happiness #1
| socalgal2 wrote:
| I'm on an M1. I talk myself out of upgrading by
| remembering that I after a few hours of happiness my
| actual day-to-day experience won't noticably change.
| drob518 wrote:
| Yea, that's what I have been telling myself. The 16 GB of
| RAM I have on the M1 is starting to be a limiting factor
| now. If the RAM was upgradable, I would do that and
| probably keep the M1.
| throwa356262 wrote:
| First of all, Apple CPUs are not the fastest. In fact top 20
| fastest CPUs right now is probably an AMD and Intel only
| affair.
|
| Apples CPUs are most powerful efficient however, due to a bunch
| of design and manufacturing choices.
|
| But to answer your question, yes Windows 11 with modern
| security crap feels 2-3 slower than vanilla Linux on the same
| hardware.
| rahkiin wrote:
| My windows with corporate crap is sometimes 2000x slower than
| without corporate crap. And consistently 10x slower than an
| M3
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I was impressed with my M4 mini when I got it a year ago
| but sometime after the Liquid Glass update it is now:
| beachball... beachball... beachball... reboot...
| beachball... beachball... Reminds me of the bad old days of
| Win XP.
| nerdsniper wrote:
| How much RAM do you have? That seems to be the main thing
| that slows down my MacBooks (original launch-day 16GB M1
| MBP and 32 GB M2 Pro). The M1 CPU is finally starting to
| show its age for some things, but the M2 Pro is really
| only RAM limited in perceived speed for me.
| drob518 wrote:
| RAM. You must have 16 GB or more. And for serious work
| now, I'm looking at 32 GB or more.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Mine has 48GB.
| leptons wrote:
| I haven't had a laptop with less than 32GB of RAM in
| about 15 years. RAM is extremely useful for some
| workloads.
| indemnity wrote:
| Don't worry, my new M4 doesn't feel much faster either due
| to all the corporate crapware. Since Windows Defender got
| ported to Mac it's become terrible in I/O and overall
| responsiveness. Any file operations will consume an entire
| core or two on Defender processes.
|
| My personal M1 feels just as fast as the work M4 due to
| this.
| leptons wrote:
| Those sound like very well tested numbers, founded in
| reality /s
| vachina wrote:
| My RHEL vnc feels snappier than the Windows 11 client it's
| running on.
|
| With maximum corporate spyware it consistently takes 1 second
| to get a visual feedback on Windows.
| nerdsniper wrote:
| I do believe Apple are still the fastest single-core (M5, A19
| Pro, and M3 Ultra leading), which still matters for a
| shocking amount of my workloads. But only the M5 has any
| noticeable gap vs Intel (~16%). Also the rankings are a bit
| gamed because AMD and Intel put out a LOT of SKU's that are
| nearly the same product, so whenever they're "winning" on a
| benchmark they take up a bunch of slots right next to
| eachother even though they're all basically the exact same
| chip.
|
| Also, all the top nearly 50 multi-core benchmarks are taken
| up by Epyc and Xeon chips. For desktop/laptop chips that
| aren't Threadripper, Apple still leads with the M3 Ultra
| 32-core in multi-core passmark benchmark. The usual caveats
| of benchmarks not being representative of any actual workload
| still apply, of course.
|
| And Apple does lag behind in multi-core benchmarks for laptop
| chips - The M3 Ultra is not offered in a laptop form-factor,
| but it does beat every AMD/Intel laptop chip as well in
| multicore benchmarks.
| throwa356262 wrote:
| Even at the time of announcement M5 was not the fastest
| chip. Not even on single core benchmark where apple usually
| shines due to the design choice of having fewer but more
| powerful cores (AMD for examples does the opposite). For
| example on geekbench Core i9-14900KS and Core Ultra 9 285K
| were faster.
|
| The distance was not huge, maybe 3%. You can obviously pick
| and choose your benchmarks until you find one where "your"
| CPU happens to be the best.
| nerdsniper wrote:
| https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-list/cinebench-scores
|
| https://www.cpubenchmark.net/single-thread/
|
| https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks vs
| https://browser.geekbench.com/processor-benchmarks
|
| Apple leads all of these in single core, by a significant
| margin. Even at geekbench.com (3398 for AMD 9950X3D vs
| 3235 for the 14900KS vs ~4000 for various Apple chips)
|
| I'm not sure I could find a single core benchmark it
| would lose no matter how hard I tried...
| deaddodo wrote:
| No, the AMD headliners still dominate for single-core
| performance[1]. Even if you normalize for similar/"same"
| chips; which really just means you have five cores each
| generation: AMD's, Intel's, Apple's, and ARM Cortex-A and
| Cortex-X.
|
| Obviously it's an Apple-to-Oranges (pardon the pun)
| comparison since the AMD options don't need to care about
| the power envelope nearly as much; and the comparison gets
| more equal when normalizing for Apple's optimized domain
| (power efficiency), but the high-end AMD laptop chips still
| edge it out.
|
| But then this turns into some sort of religious war, where
| people want to assume that their "god" should win at
| everything. It's not, the Apple chips are great; amazing
| even, when considering they're powering laptops/phones for
| 10+ hours at a time in smaller chassis than their
| competitors. But they still have to give in certain metrics
| to hit that envelope.
|
| 1 - https://thepcbottleneckcalculator.com/cpu-
| benchmarks-2026/
| nerdsniper wrote:
| I can't find which benchmarks those scores are from. It
| looks like sometimes they might have been comparing
| gaming FPS to AMDs paired with Nvidia 5090's? Something
| feels off about the site you linked - the methodology and
| scores aren't even cursorily explained, and gaming scores
| don't make sense. The 5600X doesn't even have an iGPU and
| the GFX card they had to have paired with it isn't
| listed.
|
| What does "single core gaming performance" even mean for
| a CPU that doesn't have an iGPU? How could that not be a
| category error to compare against Apple Silicon?
|
| I was looking at https://www.cpubenchmark.net/single-
| thread/
|
| See also:
|
| https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-list/cinebench-scores
|
| https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks vs
| https://browser.geekbench.com/processor-benchmarks
| ajross wrote:
| > First of all, Apple CPUs are not the fastest.
|
| The cores are. Nothing is beating a M4/M5 on single CPU
| performance, and per-cycle nothing is even particularly
| close.
|
| At the whole-chip level, there are bigger devices from the
| x86 vendors which will pull ahead on parallel benchmarks. And
| Apple's unfortunate allergy to effective cooling techniques
| (like, "faster fans move more air") means that they tend to
| throttle on chip-scale loads[1].
|
| But if you just want to Run One Thing really fast, which even
| today still correlates better to "machine feels fast" than
| parallel loads, Apple is the undisputed king.
|
| [1] One of the reasons Geekbench 6, which controversially
| includes cooling pauses, looks so much better for Apple than
| version 5 did.
| gpderetta wrote:
| It doesn't really make much sense to compare per-cycle
| performance across microarchitectures as there are multiple
| valid trade-offs.
|
| Of course Apple did pick a very good sweet spot favoring a
| wide core as opposed to a speed daemon more than the
| competition.
| ajross wrote:
| > It doesn't really make much sense to compare per-cycle
| performance across microarchitectures as there are
| multiple valid trade-offs.
|
| That's true in principle, but IMHO a little too evasive.
| In point of fact Apple 100% won this round. Their wider
| architecture is _actually faster than the competition in
| an absolute sense_ even at the deployed clock rates.
| There 's really no significant market where you'd want to
| use anything different for CPU compute anywhere.
| Datacenters would absolutely buy M5 racks if they were
| offered. M5 efficiency cores are better than Intel's or
| Zen 5c every time they're measured too.
|
| Just about the only spaces where Apple is behind[1] are
| die size and packaging: their cores take a little more
| area per benchmark point, and they're still shipping big
| single dies. And they finance both of those shortcomings
| with much higher per-part margins.
|
| Intel and AMD have moved hard into tiled architectures
| and it seems to be working out for them. I'd expect Apple
| to do the same soon.
|
| [1] Well, except the big elephant in the room that "CPU
| Performance Doesn't Matter Much Anymore". Consumer CPUs
| are fast enough and have been for years now, and the
| stuff that feels slow is on the GPU or the cloud these
| days. Apple's in critical danger of being commoditized
| out of its market space, but then that's true of every
| premium vendor throughout history.
| gpderetta wrote:
| Oh. Apple won this and the last few rounds for sure. They
| definitely picked the right microarchitecture and
| delivered masterfully.
|
| Early on personally I had doubts they could scale their
| CPU to high end desktop performance, but obviously it
| hasn't been an issue.
|
| My nitpick was purely about using clock per cycle as a
| performance metric, which is as much nonsense as
| comparing GHz: AFAIK Apple cpus still top at 4.5 GHz,
| while the AMD/Intel reach 6Ghz, so obviously the
| architectures are optimized for different target
| frequencies (which makes sense: the power costs of a high
| GHz design are astronomical).
|
| And as an microarchitecture nerd I'm definitely
| interested in how they can implement such a wide
| architecture, but wide-ness per-se is not a target.
| socalgal2 wrote:
| What fast image / video gen software is available for
| Mac? I'm jealous of my friends with 4090s and 5090s
| llm_nerd wrote:
| I don't get your first line. When people talk about
| Apple's core speeds they're not talking about cycles per
| instruction or something, they're talking about single-
| thread performance on a benchmark like Geekbench.
| Geekbench runs various real-world code and it's the gross
| throughput that is measured, and it's there that Apple
| cores shine.
| drob518 wrote:
| For laptops at least, I appreciate not having fans that
| sound like a helicopter. I guess for Mac Mini and Mac
| Studio having more fan noise is acceptable (maybe a switch
| would be nice). One of the things that I love about my Air
| is there is zero fan noise all the time. Yes, it throttles,
| and 99% of the time I don't notice and don't care. Yes, I
| know there are workloads where it would be very noticeable
| and I would care, but I don't personally run too many CPU
| bound tasks.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Bigger fans can move a lot more air while being less
| noisy, so if you care about a silent profile for any
| given amount of work the Mac Studio (or the Mac Mini if
| you don't need the full power of a Studio) is the best
| choice.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| Same. It's always disappointing when otherwise promising
| competing laptops turn out to be considerably more noisy
| if you're doing anything more intense than using MS
| Paint.
|
| It's probably the single most common corner to cut in x86
| laptops. Manufacturers love to shove hot chips into a
| chassis too thin for them and then toss in whatever cheap
| tiny-whiny-fan cooling solution they happen to have on
| hand. Result: laptop sounds like a jet engine when the
| CPU is being pushed.
| drob518 wrote:
| Exactly. They shoot for the highest benchmark score and
| build something annoying to use on a daily basis.
| benjiro wrote:
| Even something like MS Paint can turn a laptop in to a
| aircraft.
|
| The issue is actually very simple. In order to gain more
| performance, manufactures like AMD / Intel for a long
| time have been in a race for the highest frequency but if
| you have some knowhow in hardware, you know that higher
| frequency = more power draw the higher you clock.
|
| So you open your MS Paint, and ... your CPU pushes to
| 5.2Ghz, and it gets fed 15W on a single core. This
| creates a heat spike in the sensors, and your fans on
| laptops, all too often are set to react very fast. And
| VROOOOEEEEM goes your fan as the CPU Temp sensor hits 80C
| on a single core, just for a second. But wait, your MS
| Paint is open, and down goes the fan. And repeat, repeat,
| repeat ...
|
| Notice how Apple focused on running their CPUs no higher
| then 4.2Ghz or something... So even if their CPU boosts
| to 100%, that thermal peak will be maybe 7W.
|
| Now combine that with Apple using a much more tolerant
| fan / temp sensor setup. They say: 100C is perfectly
| acceptable. So when your CPU boosts, its not dumping 15W,
| but only 7W. And because the fan reaction threshold is so
| high, the fans do not react on any Apple product. Unless
| you run a single or MT process for a LONG time.
|
| And even then, the fans will only ramp up slowly if your
| 100C has been going on for a few seconds, and while yes,
| your CPU will be thermal throttling while the fans spin
| up. But you do not feel this effect.
|
| That is the real magic of Apple. Yes, their CPUs are
| masterpieces at how they get so much performance from a
| lower frequency, but the real kicker is their thermal /
| fan profile design.
|
| The wife has a old Apple clone laptop from 2018. Thing is
| for 99.9% of the time silent. No fans, nothing. Because
| Xiaomi used the same tricks on that laptop, allowing it
| to boost to the max, without triggering the fan ramping.
| And when it triggers with a long running process, they
| use a very low fan rpm until it goes way too high. I had
| laptops with the same CPU from other brands in the same
| time periode, and they all had annoying fan profiles.
| That showed me that a lot of Apple magic is good design
| around the hardware/software/fan.
|
| But ironically, that magic has been forgotten in later
| models by Xiaomi ... Tsk!
|
| Manufactures think: Its better if millions of people
| suffer from more noise, then if we need to have a few
| thousand laptops that die / get damaged, from too much
| heat. So ramp up the fans!!!
| zozbot234 wrote:
| You can mostly fix this by running your CPU in "battery
| saving" mode. CPUs should basically never boost to the
| 5GHz+ range unless they're doing something that's
| absolutely latency-critical. It's a huge waste of energy
| for a negligible increase in performance.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| And as a cherry on top, Apple uses custom fans designed
| to emit noise in less annoying frequencies and when
| multiple fans are in play, slightly varies their speeds
| to avoid harmonizing. So even when they do run, they're
| not perceived as being as loud at most speeds.
| TiredOfLife wrote:
| There is no non Apple desktop/server cpu with faster
| single core than apple m5 or even m4
| ksec wrote:
| >First of all, Apple CPUs are not the fastest. In fact top 20
| fastest CPUs right now is probably an AMD and Intel only
| affair.
|
| You are comparing 256 AMD Zen6c Core to What? M4 Max?
|
| When people say CPU they meant CPU Core, And in terms of Raw
| Speed, Apple CPU holds the fastest single core CPU
| benchmarks.
| throwa356262 wrote:
| M4 pro 16 cores is #13 among laptops:
|
| https://www.cpubenchmark.net/laptop.html#cpumark
| indemnity wrote:
| You're still looking at the multi core score, you want
| this one:
|
| https://www.cpubenchmark.net/single-thread/
|
| Where the M5 (non-pro, the one that will be in the next
| MacBook Air) is on top.
|
| When the M5 multicore scores arrive, the multi-core
| charts will be interesting.
| llm_nerd wrote:
| Nowhere in the submission or even the comment you replied to
| did anyone say "fastest". The incredibly weird knee-jerk
| defensiveness by some is bizarre.
|
| It was a discussion about how the P cores are left ready to
| speedily respond to input via the E cores satisfying
| background needs, in this case talking specifically about
| Apple Silicon because that's the writer's interest. But of
| course loads of chips have P and E cores, for the same
| reason.
| nerdsniper wrote:
| I use pretty much all platforms and architectures as my "daily
| drivers" - x64, Apple Silicon, and ARM Cortex, with various
| mixtures of Linux/Mac/Windows.
|
| When Apple released Apple Silicon, it was a huge breath of
| fresh air - suddenly the web became snappy again! And the
| battery lasted forever! Software has bloated to slow down
| MacBooks again, RAM can often be a major limiting factor in
| performance, and battery life is more variable now.
|
| Intel is finally catching up to Apple for the first time since
| 2020. Panther Lake is very competitive on everything except
| single-core performance (including battery life). Panther Lake
| CPU's arguably have better features as well - Intel QSV is
| great if you compile ffmpeg to use it for encoding, and it's
| easier to use local AI models with OpenVINO than it is to
| figure out how to use the Apple NPU's. Intel has better tools
| for sampling/tracing performance analysis, and you can actually
| see you're loading the iGPU (which is quite performant) and how
| much VRAM you're using. Last I looked, there was still no way
| to actually check if an AI model was running on Apple's CPU,
| GPU, or NPU. The iGPU's can also be configured to use varying
| amounts of system RAM - I'm not sure how that compares to
| Apple's unified memory for effective VRAM, and Apple has higher
| memory bandwidth/lower latency.
|
| I'm not saying that Intel has matched Apple, but it's
| competitive in the latest generation.
| Philip-J-Fry wrote:
| This was the same for me. M4 Pro is my first Macbook ever and
| it's actually incredible how much I prefer the daily driving
| experience versus my brand new 9800x3d/RTX 5080 desktop, or
| my work HP ZBook with 13th Gen intel i9. The battery lasts
| forever without ANY thought. On previous Windows laptops I
| had to keep an eye on the battery, or make sure it's in power
| saving mode, or make sure all the background processes aren't
| running or whatever. My Macbook just lasts forever.
|
| My work laptop will literally struggle to last 2 hours doing
| any actual work. That involves running IDEs, compiling code,
| browsing the web, etc. I've done the same on my Macbook on a
| personal level and it barely makes a dent in the battery.
|
| I feel like the battery performance is definitely down to the
| hardware. Apple Silicon is an incredible innovation. But the
| general responsiveness of the OS has to be down to Windows
| being god-awful. I don't understand how a top of the line
| desktop can still feel sluggish versus even an M1 Macbook.
| When I'm running intensive applications like games or
| compiling code on my desktop, it's rapid. But it never actual
| feels fast doing day to day things. I feel like that's half
| the problem. Windows just FEELS so slow all the time. There's
| no polish.
| nerdsniper wrote:
| My work MBP also can drain the battery in a couple hours of
| light use. But that's because of FireEye / Microsoft
| Defender. FireEye has a bug where it pegs the CPU at 100%
| indefinitely and needs to be killed to stop its infinite
| loop. Defender hates when a git checkout changes 30,000
| files and uses up all my battery (but I can't monitor this
| because I can't view the processes).
| kergonath wrote:
| I didn't even know Microsoft Defender was a thing on
| MBPs.
| a012 wrote:
| It's always the corporate wares that caused the issues,
| in my case it's crowdstrike and zscaler. Even with these
| wares I can last a full day with my M1 pro, I only notice
| the battery was drained to 0 once when I went to vacation
| for a week, it's never happened before these wares
| Arbortheus wrote:
| I also have to run Defender on my MacBook at work.
|
| If you have access to the Defender settings, I found it
| to be much better after setting an exclusion for the
| folder that you clone your git repositories to. You can
| also set exclusions for the git binary and your IDE.
| nerdsniper wrote:
| I have friendly management. I might ask them to exclude
| my folder full of git repos. Thank you. (No access on my
| end)
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Part of why Windows feels sluggish is because a lot of the
| components in many Windows machines are dogshit -
| especially storage. Even the old M2 is at 1400 MB/s write
| speed [2], M5 is at 6068 MB/s [2]. Meanwhile in the Windows
| world, supposed "gamer" laptops struggle to get above 3
| GB/s [3]. And on top of that, on Apple devices the storage
| is directly attached to the SoC - as far as I know, no
| PCIe, no nothing, just dumb NAND. That alone eliminates a
| lot of latency, and communication data paths are direct as
| well, with nothing pesky like sockets or cables degrading
| signal quality and requiring link training and whatnot.
|
| That M2 MBA however, it only feels sluggish at > 400 Chrome
| tabs open because only then swapping becomes a real
| annoyance.
|
| [1] https://9to5mac.com/2022/07/14/m2-macbook-air-slower-
| ssd-bas...
|
| [2]
| https://www.tomshardware.com/laptops/macbooks/m5-macbook-
| pro...
|
| [3] https://www.reddit.com/r/AcerNitro/comments/1i0nbt4/slo
| w_ssd...
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > Part of why Windows feels sluggish is because a lot of
| the components in many Windows machines are dogshit -
| especially storage.
|
| Except that you can replace Windows with Linux and
| suddenly it doesn't feel like dogshit anymore. SSDs are
| fast enough that they should be adding zero perceived
| latency for ordinary day-to-day operation. In fact, Linux
| still runs great on a pure spinning disk setup, which is
| something no other OS can manage today.
| LtdJorge wrote:
| Hmm, for most desktop stuff, you're still limited to
| random access, where even if leagues above HDD, the NVMe
| still suck compared to sequential. It's sad that intel
| killed Optane/3D X-point, because those are mych better
| at random workloads and they had still lower latencies
| than the latest NVMe (not by much anymore).
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Thing is, with Apple, even the bottom of the barrel entry
| devices (aka MBAs) get the high performance storage.
|
| With Windows, you're probably still getting SATA and not
| even NVMe.
| wtallis wrote:
| Windows laptops have been pretty much exclusively NVMe
| for _years_. The 2.5 " SATA form factor was a waste of
| space that laptop OEMs were very happy to be rid of,
| first with mSATA then with M.2 using SATA or NVMe. NVMe
| finished displacing SATA years ago, when the widespread
| availability of hardware supporting the NVMe Host Memory
| Buffer feature meant that entry-level NVMe SSDs could be
| both faster and cheaper than the good SATA SSDs. Most of
| the major SSD vendors discontinued their M.2 SATA SSDs
| long ago, indicating that demand for that product segment
| had collapsed.
| tempest_ wrote:
| Yeah I can tell this guy has not bought a SATA drive in a
| while.
|
| The options in that space are increasingly dwindling
| which is a problem when supporting older machines.
|
| Sometimes it is cheaper to get a sketchy m2 ssd and
| adapter than to get an actual sata drive from one of the
| larger manufactures.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| I don't understand why Optane hasn't been revived already
| for modern AI datacenter workloads. Being able to augment
| and largely replace system RAM across the board with
| something cheaper (though not as cheap as NAND, and more
| power-hungry too) ought to be a huge plus, even if the
| technology isn't suitable for replacing HBM or VRAM due
| to bulk/power constraints.
| ufmace wrote:
| Have you checked whether the work laptop's bad battery life
| is due to the OS, or due to the mountain of crapware
| security and monitoring stuff that many corporations put on
| all their computers?
|
| I currently have a M3 Pro for a work laptop. The
| performance is fine, but the battery life is not
| particularly impressive. It often hits low battery after
| just 2-3 hours without me doing anything particularly CPU-
| intensive, and sometimes drains the battery from full to
| flat while sitting closed in a backpack overnight. I'm
| pretty sure this is due to the corporate crapware, not any
| issues with Apple's OS, though it's difficult to prove.
|
| I've tended to think lately that all of the OSes are
| basically fine when set up reasonably well, but can be
| brought to their knees by a sufficient amount of low-
| quality corporate crapware.
| rngfnby wrote:
| New Mac arm user here.
|
| Replaced a good Windows machine (Ryzen 5? 32 Gb) and I have a
| late intel Mac and a Linux workstation (6 core Ryzen 5, 32 Gb).
|
| Obviously the Mac is newer. But wow. It's faster even on things
| that CPU shouldn't matter, like going through a remote samba
| mount through our corporate VPN.
|
| - Much faster than my intel Mac
|
| - Faster than my Windows
|
| - Haven't noticed any improvements over my Linux machines, but
| with my current job I no longer get to use them much for
| desktop (unfortunately).
|
| Of course, while I love my Debian setup, boot up is long on my
| workstation; screensaver/sleep/wake up is a nightmare on my
| entertainment box (my fault, but common!). The Mac just
| sleeps/wakes up with no problems.
|
| The Mac (smallest air) is also by far the best laptop Ive ever
| had from a mobility POV. Immediate start up, long battery,
| decent enough keyboard (but If rather sacrifice for a longer
| keypress)
| bstar77 wrote:
| Part of it is that the data pipelines in the Mac are far more
| efficient with its soldered memory and enhanced buses. You
| would have to use something like Halo Strix on the PC side
| see similar performance upticks at a somewhat affordable
| price bracket. Things like Samba/VPN mounting should not
| matter much (unless your mac network interface is
| significantly better), but you might see a general snappiness
| improvement. Heavy compute tasks will be a give and take with
| modern PC hardware, but Apple is still the king of
| efficiency.
|
| I still use an M1 MB Air for work mostly docked... the
| machine is insane for what it can still do, it sips power and
| has a perfect stability track record for me. I also have a
| Halo Strix machine that is the first machine that I can run
| linux and feel like I'm getting a "mac like" experience with
| virtually no compromises.
| qoez wrote:
| I love apple and mainly use one for personal use, but apple
| users consistently overrate how fast their machines are. I used
| to see sentiment like "how will nvidia ever catch up with
| apples unified silicon approach" a few years ago. But if you
| just try nvidia vs apple and compare on a per dollar level,
| nvidia is so obviously the winner.
| maccard wrote:
| For day to day use, my base spec M1 MacBook Pro is snappier
| than my i9 desktop with 128GB of ram and a 4090.
| dangus wrote:
| I think you should spend some time looking at actual laptop
| review coverage before asking questions like this.
|
| There are dozens of outlets out there that run synthetic and
| real world benchmarks that answer these questions.
|
| Apple's chips are very strong on creative tasks like video
| transcoding, they have the best single core performance as well
| as strong multi-core performance. They also have top tier power
| efficiency, battery life, and quiet operation, which is a lot
| of what people look for when doing corporate tasks.
|
| Depending on the chip model, the graphics performance is
| impressive for the power draw, but you can get better
| integrated graphics from Intel Panther Lake, and you can get
| better dedicated class graphics from Nvidia.
|
| Some outlets like Just Josh tech on YouTube are good at
| demonstrating these differences.
| lrem wrote:
| You can notice that memory bandwidth advantage even in
| workloads like photo editing and code compilation. That and the
| performance cores reserved for foreground compute, on top of
| the usual "Linux sucks at swap" (was it fixed? I haven't
| enabled swap on my Linux machines for ages by now), does make a
| day-to-day difference in my usage.
| irae wrote:
| I've used Linux as a daily driver for 6 months and I am now
| back to my M1 Max for the past month.
|
| I didn't find any reply mentioning the easy of use, benefits
| and handy things the mac does and Linux won't. Spotlight,
| Photos app with all the face recognition and general image
| index, contact sync, etc. Takes ages to setup those on Linux
| and with macs everything just works with an Apple account. So I
| wonder if Linux had to do all this background stuff, if it
| would be able to run smoothly as Macs run this days.
|
| For context: I was running Linux for 6 months for the first
| time in 10 years (which I was daily driving macs). My M1 Max
| still beats my full tower gaming PC, which I was using linux
| at. I've used Windows and Linux before, and Windows for gaming
| too. My Linux setup was very snappy without any corporate
| stuff. But my office was getting warm because of the PC. My M1
| barely turn on the fans, even with large DB migrations and
| other heavy operation during software development.
| bluedino wrote:
| Somehow my 2011 MacBook Pro was the fastest laptop I had ever
| used.
|
| After I put an SSD in it, that is.
|
| I wonder what my Apple silicon laptop is even doing sometimes.
| testdelacc1 wrote:
| I haven't used a laptop other than a mac in 10 years. I
| remember being extremely frustrated with the Intel macs. What I
| hated most was getting into video meetings, which would make
| the Intel CPU sound like a 747 taxiing.
|
| The switch from a top spec, new Intel Mac to a base model M1
| Macbook Air was like a breath of fresh air. I still use that 5
| year old laptop happily because it was such a leap forward in
| performance. I dont recall ever being happy with a 5 year old
| device.
| ahepp wrote:
| I think you're bringing up a great question here. If you ask a
| random person on the street "is your laptop fast", the answer
| probably has more to do with what software that person is
| running, than what hardware.
|
| My Apple silicon laptop feels super fast because I just open
| the lid and it's running. That's not because the CPU ran
| instructions super fast, it's because I can just close the lid
| and the battery lasts forever.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| > The fact that an idle Mac has over 2,000 threads running in
| over 600 processes is good news
|
| Not when one of those decides to wreck havoc - spotlight indexing
| issues slowly eating away your disk space, icloud sync spinning
| over and over and hanging any app that tries to read your
| Documents folder, Photos sync pegging all cores at 100%... it
| feels like things might be getting a little out of hand. How can
| anyone model/predict system behaviour with so many moving parts?
| fragmede wrote:
| and if it paid off, that would almost be acceptable! But no.
| After spotlight has indexed my /Applications folder, when I hit
| command-spacebar and type "preview.app", it takes ~4 seconds on
| my M4 laptop to search the sqlite database for it and return
| that entry.
|
| _grumble_
| admissionsguy wrote:
| TIL there is a search bar triggered by CMD+Space. After 15
| long years.
| rngfnby wrote:
| Too late. Apple has destroyed it.
|
| I just got my first ARM Mac to replace my work Win machine
| (what has MS done to Windows!?!? :'()
|
| Used to be I could type "display" and Id get right to
| display settings in settings. Now it shows thousands of
| useless links to who knows what. Instead I have to type
| "settings" and then, within settings, type "display"
|
| Still better than the Windows shit show.
|
| Honestly, a well setup Linux machine has better user
| experience than anything on the market today.
| chaostheory wrote:
| > a well setup Linux machine has better user experience
| than anything on the market today
|
| We probably have to preface that with "for older people".
| IMO Linux has changed less UX wise than either Windows or
| MacOS in recent years
| ff2400t wrote:
| Because of Linux's Fragmentation there are so many
| different UI being created right now and so much more
| experimentation. There is KDE with endless customization,
| Gnome for the people who are okay with a more opinionated
| UI, Cosmic the completely new Desktop Environment and of
| course the good old lxde. I have to use Windows at work
| these day and every single one of these makes the Windows
| feel like it's more suited for Old People because of how
| slow it can be.
| chaostheory wrote:
| Yes but most people just fire up the distro, UI, and
| settings that they're most comfortable with for their
| daily driver. People can and often keep things the same
| tempest_ wrote:
| Does KDE have endless customization?
|
| I just installed Plasma with Endevouros and use it. I
| used Cinnamon before it. They don't require much effort.
| adrian_b wrote:
| Even if the degradation of the user interfaces is noticed
| especially by older people, I doubt that this has
| anything to do with them being old and I believe that it
| is caused only by them being more experienced, i.e.
| having seen more alternatives for user interfaces.
|
| For several decades, I have used hundreds of different
| computers, from IBM mainframes, DEC minicomputers and
| early PCs with Intel 8080 or Motorola MC6800 until the
| latest computers with AMD Zen 5 or Intel Arrow Lake. I
| have used a variety of operating systems and user
| interfaces.
|
| During the first decades, there has been a continuous and
| obvious improvement in user interfaces, so I never had
| any hesitation to switch to a new program with a
| completely different user interface for the same
| application, even every year or every few months,
| whenever such a change resulted in better results and
| productivity.
|
| Nevertheless, an optimum seems to have been reached
| around 20 years ago, and since then more often than not I
| see only worse interfaces that make harder to do what was
| simpler previously, so there is no incentive for an
| "upgrade".
|
| Therefore I indeed customize my GUIs in Linux to a mode
| that resembles much more older Windows or MacOS than
| their recent versions and which prioritizes instant
| responses and minimum distractions over the coolest look.
|
| In the rare occasions when I find a program that does
| something in a better way than what I am using, I still
| switch immediately to it, no matter how different it may
| be in comparison with what I am familiar, so conservatism
| has nothing to do with preferring the older GUIs.
| chaostheory wrote:
| I believe it's more about familiarity and being more
| resistant to change both good and bad
| pwg wrote:
| > Nevertheless, an optimum seems to have been reached
| around 20 years ago, and since then more often than not I
| see only worse interfaces that make harder
|
| A consequence of having "UI designers" paid on salary
| instead of individual contract jobs that expire when the
| specific fix is complete. In order to preserve their
| continuing salary, the UI designers have to continue
| making changes for changes sake (so that the accounting
| dept. does not begin asking: "why are we paying salary
| for all these UI designers if they are not creating any
| output"). So combining reaching an optimum 20 years ago
| with the fact that the UI designers must make changes for
| the sake of change, results in the changes being sub-
| optimal.
| Detrytus wrote:
| > Nevertheless, an optimum seems to have been reached
| around 20 years ago, and since then more often than not I
| see only worse interfaces that make harder to do what was
| simpler previously, so there is no incentive for an
| "upgrade".
|
| "I've come up with a set of rules that describe our
| reactions to technologies:
|
| 1. Anything that is in the world when you're born is
| normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way
| the world works.
|
| 2. Anything that's invented between when you're fifteen
| and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and
| you can probably get a career in it.
|
| 3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against
| the natural order of things."
|
| Douglas Adams
| pxoe wrote:
| >windows shit show
|
| And yet on Windows 11, hit Win key, type display, it
| immediately shows display settings as the first result.
| maccard wrote:
| Unless it decides to update your search results to search
| for "Display" with bing in Edge, despite edge not being
| my browser.
| elcritch wrote:
| Followed by 5 ads and a link to use copilot! ;)
| UqWBcuFx6NV4r wrote:
| Despite what the sibling comment says, my anecdata is that
| cmd+space works perfectly fine.
|
| People are really unable to differentiate "I am having
| issues" and "things are universally or even widely broken"
| cpuguy83 wrote:
| Or, and bear with me hear, there _is_ a problem even if
| you aren 't experiencing it.
|
| I've been using spotlight since it was introduced for...
| everything. In Tahoe it has been absolutely terrible.
| Unusable. _Always_ indexing. Never showing me
| applications which is the main thing I use it for (yes,
| it is configured to show applications!). They broke
| something.
| admissionsguy wrote:
| for the record, my newish mac shows the display settings
| fine when i type display
| tambourine_man wrote:
| I may be a spotlight unicorn, but I've never seen this
| behavior people complain about. Spotlight has always been
| instant for me, since its introduction and I've never seen a
| regression.
|
| It is completely useless on network mounts, however, where I
| resort to find/grep/rg
| etrvic wrote:
| On my Intel mac searching with cmd+space for a file takes
| under a second. Maybe there is a problem on your end?
| ricardobeat wrote:
| I've actually had worse problems as recently as last week:
| Apps stopped showing up completely in spotlight.
|
| Only a system reinstall + manually deleting all index files
| fixed it. Meanwhile it was eating 20-30GB of disk space.
| There are tons of reports of this in the apple forums.
|
| Even then, it feels a lot slower in MacOS 26 than it did
| before, and you often get the rug-pull effect of your
| results changing a millisecond before you press the enter
| key. I would pay good money to go back to Snow Leopard.
| etrvic wrote:
| I had the same problem last year, re-indexing all the
| files fixed it for me[1].
|
| That being said, macOS was definitely more snappy back on
| Catalina, which was the first version I had so I can't
| vouch for Snow Leopard. Each update after Catalina felt
| gradually worse and from what i heard Tahoe feels like
| the last nail in the coffin.
|
| I hope the UX team will deliver a more polished,
| expressive and minimal design next time.
|
| [1] - https://support.apple.com/en-us/102321
| samtheprogram wrote:
| Catalina and Mojave were the closest releases in terms of
| quality that we got to Snow Leopard. Catalina in
| particular since it was the release that removed more
| 32-bit cruft (like Snow Leopard before it).
| throw234232t3 wrote:
| On pre-Tahoe macOS there is the "Applications" view
| (accessible e.g. from the dock). Since the only thing I would
| use Spotlight for is searching through applications to start,
| I changed the Cmd+Space keybind to launch the Applications
| view. The search is instant.
|
| Spotlight, aside from failing to find applications also
| pollutes the search results with random files it found on the
| filesystem, some shortcuts to search the web and whatnot.
| Also, at the start of me using a Mac it repeatedly got into
| the state of not displaying any results whatsoever. Fixing
| that each time required running some arcane commands in the
| terminal. Something that people associate with Linux, but
| ironically I think now Linux requires less of that than Mac.
|
| But in Tahoe they removed the Applications view, so my
| solution is gone now.
|
| All in all, with Apple destroying macOS in each release,
| crippling DTrace with SIP, Liquid Glass, poor performance
| monitoring compared to what I can see with tools like perf on
| Linux, or Intel VTune on Windows, Metal slowly becoming the
| only GPU programming option, I think I'm going to be
| switching back to Linux.
| saagarjha wrote:
| macOS profiling tools completely blow Linux's perf out of
| the water. It's not even close.
| krior wrote:
| You are saying that like perf is Linux only profiling
| tool.
| saagarjha wrote:
| That's what they compared to
| throw234232t3 wrote:
| https://blog.bugsiki.dev/posts/apple-pmu/
|
| _> I quickly found out that Apple Instruments doesn't
| support fetching more than 10 counters, sometimes 8, and
| sometimes less. I was constantly getting errors like
| '<SOME_COUNTER>' conflicts with a previously added event.
| The maximum that I could get is 10 counters. So, the
| first takeaway was that there is a limit to how many
| counters I can fetch, and another is that counters are,
| in some way, incompatible with each other. Why and how
| they're incompatible is a good question._
|
| Also: https://hmijailblog.blogspot.com/2015/09/using-
| intels-perfor...
| saagarjha wrote:
| It's a condemnation of how bad perf is if it loses to
| that.
| throw234232t3 wrote:
| So far I have provided you with examples of how
| Instruments.app loses to perf. Perf does not have these
| limitations. You have not provided any examples in the
| reverse direction.
| saagarjha wrote:
| Both of your examples are actually very good at
| explaining my point. Both Instruments and perf largely
| expose the same information, since they use trace
| features in the hardware together with kernel support to
| profile code. Where they differ is the UI they provide.
| perf provides almost nothing; Instruments provides almost
| everything. This is because perf is basically a library
| and Instruments is a tool that you use to find
| performance problems.
|
| Why do I like Instruments and think it is better? Because
| the people who designed it optimized it for solving real
| performance problems. There are a bunch of "templates"
| that are focused on issues like "why is my thing so slow,
| what is it doing" to "why am I using too much memory" to
| "what network traffic is coming out of this app". These
| are real, specific problems while perf will tell you
| things like "oh this instruction has a 12% cache miss
| rate because it got scheduled off the core 2ms ago".
| Which is something Instruments can also tell you, but the
| idea is that this is totally the wrong interface that you
| should be presenting for doing performance work since
| just presenting people with data is barely useful.
|
| What people do instead with perf is they have like 17
| scripts 12 of which were written by Brendan Gregg to load
| the info into something that can be half useful to them.
| This is to save you time if you don't know how the Linux
| kernel works. Part of the reason why flamegraphs and
| Perfetto are so popular is because everyone is so
| desperate to pull out the info and get something,
| anything, that's not the perf UI that they settle for
| what they can get. Instruments has exceptionally good UI
| for its tools, clearly designed by people who solve real
| performance problems. perf is a raw data dump from the
| kernel with some lipstick on it.
|
| Mind you, I trust the data that perf is dumping because
| the tool is rock-solid. Instruments is not like that.
| It's buggy, sometimes undocumented (to be fair, perf is
| not great either, but at least it is open source), slow,
| and crashes a lot. This majorly sucks. But even with this
| I solve a lot more problems clicking around Instruments
| UI and cursing at it than I do with perf. And while they
| are slow to fix things they are directionally moving
| towards cleaning up bugs and allowing data export, so the
| problems that you brought up (which are very valid) are
| solved or on their way towards being solved.
| sgarland wrote:
| > Because the people who designed it optimized it for
| solving real performance problems.
|
| The implication that perf is not is frankly laughable.
| Perhaps one major difference is that perf assumes you
| know how the OS works, and what various syscalls are
| doing.
| eviks wrote:
| > perf assumes you know how the OS works, and what
| various syscalls are doing.
|
| You just proved again that it's not optimized for reality
| because that knowledge can't be assumed as the pool of
| people trying to solve real performance problems is much
| wider than the pool with that knowledge
| brigade wrote:
| Your first example is a CPU limitation that Instruments
| doesn't model (does perf?), but is still mostly better
| than Intel chips that are limited to 4 dynamic counters
| (I think still? At least that's what I see in the Alder
| Lake's Golden Cove perfmon files...)
|
| Your second example, is the complaint that Instruments
| doesn't have flamegraph visualization? That was true a
| decade ago when it was written, and is not true today. Or
| that Instrument's trace file format isn't documented?
| littlecranky67 wrote:
| I have the same issue on my M4 Macbook Pro and I had it on my
| previous M2 Apple Mac Mini, on several macOS versions (pre-
| Tahoe). I suspect it has to do with the virtual filesystem
| layer, as I had used OneDrive for Mac and now Proton Drive.
| Whatever it is, it has been broken for years on several
| devices and OSes and I am pretty sure Apple doesn't care
| about it.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| It feels like the 2000s era of "Mac software is better but
| you have to tolerate their hardware to enjoy it" has inverted
| in the last 5 years. Incredible hardware down to in-house
| silicon, but software that would have given Steve Jobs a
| stroke.
|
| Firstly performance issues like wtf is going on with search.
| Then there seems to be a need to constantly futz with stable
| established apps UXes every annual OS update for the sake of
| change. Moving buttons, adding clicks to workflows, etc.
|
| My most recent enraging find was the date picker in the
| reminders app. When editting a reminder, there is an up/down
| arrow interface to the side of the date, but if you click
| them they change the MONTH. Who decided that makes any sense.
| In what world is bumping a reminder by a month the most
| common change? It's actually worse than useless, its actively
| net negative.
| irae wrote:
| I've never had this issue. M1 Max. But I also disable some of
| the Spotlight indexes. Cmmd+Space has no files for me, when I
| know I am searching for a file I use Finder search instead.
| hmokiguess wrote:
| for me it's iMessage, it gets out of sync way too often and
| then it eats the CPU away
| sgt wrote:
| Pretty heavy iMessage user here, but I can't say I experience
| any issues, and that's probably why your issue is not getting
| fixed - ie. nobody at Apple is able to reproduce it. Maybe
| you should gather some info about it and see if you can send
| a bug report?
| hmokiguess wrote:
| fair point, I should -- one classic symptom I experience is
| the emoji picker will make it crash, not load quickly, and
| if it finishes loading they all appear as empty
| placeholders (maybe because I have way too many stickers
| and iCloud sync is tripping? idk)
| dawnerd wrote:
| It happens more often when switching devices, particularly
| if it's a less than regularly used device like an iPad.
| Happens with my travel MacBook. Takes messages a solid day
| to catch up.
| eptcyka wrote:
| The most I've heard back from a reproducible bug report was
| "cool, it shouldn't do that". The response came on the dev
| forums, the actual bug has never been acknowledged or
| fixed. Multiple times. Why bother?
| sjtgraham wrote:
| link?
| jghn wrote:
| What I've found is if I open a picture in iMessage it tends
| to trigger the CPU hungry behavior. I notice it after a
| while as my laptop starts getting hot and battery draining
| much faster than expected. I hard quite iMessage, reopen
| it, and all is fine.
| LtdJorge wrote:
| Sounds like typical Windows experience
| lrem wrote:
| It's slowly approaching what SRE has been dealing with for
| distributed systems... You just have to accept things won't be
| fully understood and whip out your statistical tooling, it's
| ok. And if they get the engineering right, you might still keep
| your low latency corner where only an understandable set of
| things are allowed.
| emchammer wrote:
| If open source projects like Slackware Linux can keep it
| stable on zero budget with a zoo of components since before
| we knew what SRE was, then Apple can afford to have operating
| system specialists who know the whole system. It's like they
| gave up and welded the jukebox closed because it was making
| enough money.
| otterley wrote:
| Slackware Linux is way less complicated than MacOS. It runs
| far fewer, and much simpler, components and much less
| functionality in a default install. Like any Linux, there
| are myriad problems that can arise as users begin
| customizing the system, but until then, all those potential
| bugs remain deceptively hidden below the surface. And
| Slackware also has no constantly moving hardware team to
| keep track against and no hard timelines to hit for
| releases.
| twoodfin wrote:
| My pet peeve with the modern macOS architecture & its 600
| coordinating processes & Grand Central Dispatch work queues is
| debugability.
|
| Fifteen years ago, if an application started spinning or mail
| stopped coming in, you could open up Console.app and have
| reasonable confidence the app in question would have logged an
| easy to tag error diagnostic. This was how the plague of
| mysterious DNS resolution issues got tied to the half-baked
| discoveryd so quickly.
|
| Now, those 600 processes and 2000 threads are blasting
| thousands of log entries per second, with dozens of errors
| happening in unrecognizable daemons doing thrice-delegated
| work.
| ninkendo wrote:
| > Now, those 600 processes and 2000 threads are blasting
| thousands of log entries per second, with dozens of errors
| happening in unrecognizable daemons doing thrice-delegated
| work.
|
| This is the kind of thing that makes me want to grab Craig
| Federighi by the scruff and rub his nose in it. Every event
| that's scrolling by here, an engineer thought was a bad
| enough scenario to log it at Error level. There should be
| _zero_ of these on a standard customer install. How many of
| these are legitimate bugs? Do they even know? (Hahaha, of
| course they don't.)
|
| Something about the invisibility of background daemons makes
| them like flypaper for really stupid, face-palm level bugs.
| Because approximately zero customers look at the console
| errors and the crash files, they're just sort of invisible
| and tolerated. Nobody seems to give a damn at Apple any more.
| bool3max wrote:
| Are you sure they don't get sent to Apple as part of some
| telemetry / diagnostics implementation?
| ninkendo wrote:
| Oh they absolutely are. But Apple clearly doesn't care
| enough to _actually fix them_. They seem to get worse
| every release.
| krackers wrote:
| >with dozens of errors happening in unrecognizable daemons
| doing thrice-delegated work.
|
| It seems like a perfect example of Jevons paradox (or
| andy/bill law): unified logging makes logging rich and cheap
| and free, but that causes everyone to throw it everywhere
| willy nilly. It's so noisy in there that I'm not sure who the
| logs are for anymore, it's useless for the user of the
| computer and even as a developer it seems impossible to debug
| things just by passively watching logs unless you already
| know the precise filter predicate.
|
| In fact they must realize it's hopeless because the new
| Console doesn't even give you a mechanism to read past logs
| (I have to download eclecticlight's Ulbow for that).
| kristianp wrote:
| I wonder if that explains my intermittent keyboard lockups on
| MacOS? The keyboard just failing to work for a few minutes. The
| keyboard, a logitec one with a dongle, never has problems under
| windows or linux. M1 mac mini, not upgraded to Tahoe yet.
| amelius wrote:
| That's just framing. A different wording could be: by moving more
| work to slow (but power efficient) cores, the other cores (let's
| call them performance cores) are free to do other stuff.
| drob518 wrote:
| Does anyone have any insight into the MacOS scheduler and the
| algorithm it uses to place threads on E vs. P cores? Is it as
| simple as noting whether a thread was last suspended blocking on
| I/O or for a time slice timeout and mapping I/O blockers to E
| cores and time slice blockers to P cores? Or does the programmer
| indicate a static mapping at thread creation? I write code on a
| Mac all the time, but I use Clojure and all the low level OS
| decisions are opaque to me.
| sys_64738 wrote:
| The article mentions P or E is generally decided by if it's a
| "background" process (whatever than means). Possible some
| (undocumented) designation in code or directive to the compiler
| of the binary decides this at compile time.
| masklinn wrote:
| > whatever than means
|
| It's a QoS level: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/d
| ispatch/dispatchq...
| detourdog wrote:
| https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/tech-talks/110147/
| drob518 wrote:
| Excellent, thanks!
| masklinn wrote:
| The baseline is static: low QoS tasks are dispatched to the E
| cores, while high QoS tasks are dispatched to P cores. IIRC
| high QoS cores can migrate to the E cores if all P cores are
| loaded, but my understanding is that the lowest QoS tasks
| (background) never get promoted to P cores.
| drob518 wrote:
| How is the QoS communicated to the scheduler? Is there a mark
| on the binary or does the code do it at thread startup?
| dcrazy wrote:
| The Apple software stack makes heavy use of thread pools
| via libdispatch. Individual work items are tagged with QoS,
| which influences which thread picks up the work item from
| the queue.
| saagarjha wrote:
| It's done in code.
| macshome wrote:
| Check out the scheduler documentation that Apple has in the xnu
| repo. https://github.com/apple-oss-
| distributions/xnu/blob/main/doc...
| drob518 wrote:
| This is exactly what I was looking for. Thanks. Lots of
| technical details here for those interested.
| sys_64738 wrote:
| My M2 MBA doesn't have a fan but literally smokes the majority on
| Intel systems which are space heaters this time of year. Those
| legacy x86 apps don't really exist for the majority of people
| anymore.
| ProllyInfamous wrote:
| If you place 1mm thermal pads between the sinks and the case,
| the CPUs/GPUs won't throttle as readily. At least for my M3 MBA
| (check your actual clearance).
|
| I replaced a MacPro5,1 with an M2Pro -- which uses _soooooo_
| much less energy performing similarly mundane tasks (~15x+).
| Idle is ~25W v. 160W
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Caution: don't put the laptop in your lap if you've done
| this. There's a reason it doesn't ship like that out of the
| box.
| ksec wrote:
| >If you use an Apple silicon Mac I'm sure you have been impressed
| by its performance.
|
| This article couldn't have come at a better time. Because frankly
| speaking I am not that impressed after I tested Omarchy Linux.
| Everything was snappy. It is like back to DOS or Windows 3.11
| era. ( Not quite but close ) It makes me wonder why Mac couldn't
| be like that.
|
| Apple Silicon is fast, no doubt about it. It isn't some
| benchmarks but even under emulation, compiling or other workload
| it is fast if not the fastest. So there are plenty of evidence it
| isn't benchmark specific which some people claims Apple is only
| fast on Geekbench. The problem is macOS is slow. And for whatever
| reason haven't improved much. I am hoping dropping support for
| x86 in next macOS meant they have time and excuses to do a lot of
| work on macOS under the hood. Especially with OOM and Paging.
| microtonal wrote:
| I have a ThinkPad besides my main MacBook. I recently switched
| to KDE, a full desktop environment, and it is just insane how
| much faster everything renders than on macOS. And that's on a
| relatively underpowered integrated Ryzen GPU. Window dragging
| is butter smooth on a 120Hz screen, which I cannot say of macOS
| (though it outright terrible with the recent Electron issue).
|
| Apple Silicon is awesome and was a game changer when it came
| out. Still very impressive that they have been able to keep the
| MacBook Air passively cooled since the first M1. But yeah,
| macOS is holding it back.
| spockz wrote:
| Modern machines are so insanely fast, the UI should almost
| react _before_ you do an action.
|
| My 5900X machine with relatively slow RAM running CachyOS
| actually almost feels as instant as DOS machines with
| incredible low latency.
|
| Instead, we get tons of layers of abstraction (Electron etc),
| combined with endpoint security software in the enterprise
| world that bring any machine to its knees by inspecting every
| I/O action.
|
| Zed is an awesome editor where every interaction is just
| "snappy".
|
| I feel all the animations and transitions have been
| introduced to macOS just to paper over slowness. I've
| disabled them via the accessibility settings which helps in
| perceived snappiness a bit, but it also makes yank visible
| where performance is not up to par.
| kgeist wrote:
| Can't Windows/Linux pin background threads to specific cores on
| Intel too? So that your foreground app isn't slowed down by all
| the background activity going on? Or there's something else to it
| that I don't understand. I thought E cores' main advantage is
| that they use less power which is good for battery life on
| laptops. But the article makes it sound like main advantage of
| Apple Silicon is that it splits foreground/background workloads
| better. Isn't it something that can already be done without a P/E
| distinction?
| ctrlrsf wrote:
| Linux yes, of course.
| LtdJorge wrote:
| Yes, it's the job of the scheduler
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| It's both.
|
| Multithreading has been more ubiquitous in Mac apps for a long
| time thanks to Apple having offered mainstream multi-CPU
| machines very early on (circa 2000), predating even OS X
| itself, and has made a point of making multithreading easier in
| its SDK. By contrast multicore machines weren't common in the
| Windows/x86 world until around the late 2000s with the boom of
| Intel's Core series CPUs, but single core x86 CPUs persisted
| for several years following and Windows developer culture still
| hasn't embraced multithreading as fully as its Mac counterpart
| has.
|
| This then made it dead simple for Mac developers to adopt task
| prioritization/QoS. Work was already cleanly split into
| threads, so it's just a matter of specifying which are best
| suited for putting on e-cores and which to keep on P-cores. And
| overwhelmingly, Mac devs have done that.
|
| So the system scheduler is a good deal more effective than its
| Windows counterpart because third party devs have given it cues
| to guide it. The tasks most impactful to the user's perception
| of snappiness remain on the P-cores, the E-cores stay busy with
| auxiliary work and keep the P-cores unblocked and able to sleep
| more quickly and often.
| kgeist wrote:
| Windows has SetThreadPriority and SetThreadAffinityMask since
| at least Windows XP.
| 3eb7988a1663 wrote:
| Yeah, this my guess as well. The other OSes have the
| ability to pin to specific cores, but first party Apple
| leaned hard into coding to that hardware vision. Since
| Apple would love to merge the desktop and mobile software,
| being very deliberate about what is background vs
| foreground work is essential. Windows and Linux have not
| had the hardware guarantees of differentiating between
| cores, so few programs have taken the effort to be explicit
| about how the work is executed.
|
| When I ran Gnome, I was regularly annoyed at how often an
| indexing service would chew through CPU.
| kgeist wrote:
| There was an article by Raymond Chen where he argued that
| giving app developers an API option to say "run me under
| high/low priority" rarely works because every developer
| views their program as the main character on the stage
| and couldn't care less about other programs' performance,
| and they are incentivized to enable the "high priority"
| option if given a chance because it makes their program
| run better (at the expense of other programs). So unless
| there's a strict audit on some kind of app store or some
| API rules which enforce developers don't abuse the
| priority API, sometimes it's better to let the OS decide
| all the scheduling dynamically as the programs run (say,
| a foreground UI window automatically is given a high
| priority by the OS), so that the scheduling was fair.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| The way it's conceptualized on Apple platforms is
| primarily user-initiated vs. program initiated, with the
| former getting priority. It's positioned as being about
| tasks _within_ a program competing for resources rather
| than programs competing with each other.
|
| So for example, if in an email client the user has
| initiated the export of a mailbox, that is given utmost
| priority while things like indexing and periodic fetches
| get put on the back burner.
|
| This works because even a selfish developer wants their
| program to run well, which setting all tasks as high
| priority actively and often visibly impedes, and so they
| push less essential work to the background.
|
| It just happens that in this case, smart threading on the
| per-process level makes life for the system scheduler
| easier.
| m132 wrote:
| It's the combination of the two that yields the best of both
| worlds.
|
| Android SoCs have adopted heterogenous CPU architectures
| ("big.LITTLE" in the ARM sphere) years before Apple, and as a
| result, there have been multiple attempts to tackle this in
| Linux. The latest, upstream, and perhaps the most widely
| deployed way of efficiently using such processors involves
| using Energy-Aware Scheduling [1]. This allows the kernel to
| differentiate between performant and efficient cores, and
| schedule work accordingly, avoiding situations in which brief
| workloads are put on P cores and the demanding ones start
| hogging E cores. Thanks to this, P cores can also be put to
| sleep when their extra power is not needed, saving power.
|
| One advantage macOS still has over Linux is that its kernel can
| tell performance-critical and background workloads apart
| without taking guesses. This is beneficial on all sorts of
| systems, but particularly shines on those heterogenous ones,
| allowing unimportant workloads to always occupy E cores, and
| freeing P cores for loads that would benefit from them, or
| simply letting them sleep for longer. Apple solved this problem
| by defining a standard interface for the user-space to
| communicate such information down [2]. As far as I'm aware,
| Linux currently lacks an equivalent [3].
|
| Technically, your application can still pin its threads to
| individual cores, but to know which core is which, it would
| have to parse information internal to the scheduler. I haven't
| seen any Linux application that does this.
|
| [1] https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/scheduler/sched-
| energ...
|
| [2]
| https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Pe...
|
| [3] https://github.com/swiftlang/swift-corelibs-
| libdispatch?tab=...
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > As far as I'm aware, Linux currently lacks an equivalent
|
| SCHED_BATCH and SCHED_IDLE scheduling policies. They've been
| there since forever.
| 3eb7988a1663 wrote:
| Similarly, are there any modern benchmarks of the performance
| impact of pinning programs to a core in Linux? Are we talking
| <1% or something actually notable for a CPU bound program?
|
| I have read there are some potential security benefits if you
| were to keep your most exploitable programs (eg web browser) on
| its own dedicated core.
| anarazel wrote:
| It's very heavily dependent on what your processes are doing.
| I've seen extreme cases where the gains of pinning were large
| (well over 2x when cooperative tasks were pinned to the same
| core), but thats primarily about preventing the CPU from
| idling long enough to enter deeper idle states.
| anupamchugh wrote:
| Pinning exists, but the interesting part is signal quality:
| macOS gets consistent "urgency" signals (QoS) from a lot of
| frameworks/apps, so scheduling on heterogeneous cores is less
| guessy than infer from runtime behavior.
| ninkendo wrote:
| One thing that distinguishes macOS here is that the mach kernel
| has the concept of "vouchers" which helps the scheduler
| understand logical calls across IPC boundaries. So if you have
| a high-priority (UserInitiated) process, and it makes an IPC
| call out to a daemon that is _usually_ a low-priority
| background daemon, the high-priority process passes a voucher
| to the low-priority one, which allows the daemon's ipc handling
| thread to run high-priority (and thus access P-cores) so long
| as it's holding the voucher.
|
| This lets Apple architect things as small, single-
| responsibility processes, but make their priority dynamic, such
| that they're usually low-priority unless a foreground user
| process is blocked on their work. I'm not sure the Linux kernel
| has this.
| spockz wrote:
| That it actually quite simple and nifty. It reminds me of the
| 4 priorities RPC requests can have within the Google stack. 0
| being if this fails it will result in a big fat error for the
| user to 3, we don't care if this fails because we will run
| the analysis job again in a month or so.
|
| IIRC in macOS you do need to pass the voucher, it isn't
| inherited automatically. Linux has no knowledge of it, so
| first it has to be introduced as a concept and then apps have
| to start using it.
| saagarjha wrote:
| > Admittedly the impression isn't helped by a dreadful piece of
| psychology, as those E cores at 100% are probably running at a
| frequency a quarter of those of P cores shown at the same 100%
|
| It's about half, actually
|
| > The fact that an idle Mac has over 2,000 threads running in
| over 600 processes is good news
|
| I mean, only if they're doing something useful
| psanford wrote:
| I'm curious how asahi linux manages scheduling across e cores and
| p cores. Has anyone done experiments with this?
|
| _Edit:_ It looks like there was some discussion about this on
| the Asahi blog 2 years ago[0].
|
| [0]: https://asahilinux.org/2024/01/fedora-asahi-new/
| eviks wrote:
| > The fact that an idle Mac has over 2,000 threads running in
| over 600 processes is good news, and the more of those that are
| run on the E cores, the faster our apps will be
|
| This doesn't make sense in a rather fundamental way - there is no
| way to design a real computer where doing some useless work is
| better than doing no work, just think about energy consumption
| and battery life since this is laptops. Or that's just resources
| your current app can't use
|
| Besides, they aren't that well engineered, bugs exist and last
| and come back, etc, so even when on average the impact isn't big,
| you can get a few photo analysis indexing going haywire for
| awhile and get stuck
| ahepp wrote:
| I think in the example the OP is making, the work is not
| useless. They're saying if you had a system doing the same
| work, with maybe 60 processes, you're better off splitting that
| into 600 processes and a couple thousand threads, since that
| will allow granular classification of tasks by their latency
| sensitivity
| eviks wrote:
| But it is, he's talking about real systems with real
| processes in a generic way, not a singular hypothetical where
| suddenly all that work must be done, so you can also apply
| you general knowledge that some of those background processes
| aren't useful (but can't even be disabled due to system
| lockdown)
| ua709 wrote:
| I think you're right that the article didn't provide
| criteria for when this type of system is better or worse
| than another. For example, the cost of splitting a work
| into threads and switching between threads needs to be
| factored in. If that cost is very high, then the multi-
| thread system could very well be worse. And there are other
| factors too.
|
| However, given the trend in modern software engineering to
| break work into units and the fact that on modern hardware
| thread switches happen very quickly, being able to
| distribute that work across different compute clusters that
| make different optimization choices is a good thing and
| allows schedulers to get results closer to optimal.
|
| So really it boils down to if the gains in doing the work
| on different compute outweighs the cost splitting and
| distributing the work, then it's a win. And for most modern
| software on most modern hardware, the win is very
| significant.
|
| As always, YMMV
| locknitpicker wrote:
| > (...) a singular hypothetical where suddenly all that
| work must be done (...)
|
| This is far from being a hypothesis. This is an accurate
| description of your average workstation. I recommend you
| casually check the list of processes running at any given
| moment in any random desktop or laptop you find in a 5
| meter radius.
| mathisfun123 wrote:
| > This doesn't make sense in a rather fundamental way - there
| is no way to design a real compute
|
| Hmm I guess the apple silicon laptops don't exist? Did I dream
| that I bought one year? Maybe I did - it has been a confusing
| year.
| eviks wrote:
| You did dream, though not that you bought a laptop, but
| rather that you understood the comment.
| mathisfun123 wrote:
| You literally say in a sibling comment
|
| > he's talking about real systems with real processes in a
| generic way
|
| So which real but impossible to design systems are we
| discussing then if not the Apple silicon systems?
| m463 wrote:
| I would say a good number of those processes/cores are
| something you don't want running. And you can't turn them off
| unless you can modify the boot partition to disable the launch
| configs.
|
| sigh.
| dgxyz wrote:
| Most of them don't do anything at all until needed.
| GeorgeOldfield wrote:
| most of them are needed at one time or another.
|
| also a mandatory: and yet the macbooks are faster and more
| battery efficient than any PC laptop with linux/windows
| locknitpicker wrote:
| > (...) where doing some useless work is better than doing no
| work (...)
|
| This take expresses a fundamental misunderstanding of the whole
| problem domain. There is a workload comprised of hundreds of
| processes, some of which multithreaded, that need to be
| processed. That does not change nor go away. You have
| absolutely no suggestion that any of those hundreds of
| processes is "useless". What you will certainly have are
| processes that will be waiting for IO, but waiting for a
| request to return a response is not useless.
| ua709 wrote:
| In this case the "useless" work is the cost of moving and
| distributing the threads between different compute clusters.
| That cost is nonzero, and does needs to be factored in, but
| it's also more than overwhelmed by the benefits gained from
| doing the move.
| jwilliams wrote:
| Although there is the consistent trap of tools that assign
| threads/workers based on the number of cores (e.g unit testing or
| bundling tools). This means the efficiency cores get dragged in
| and can absolutely tank the process.
|
| This was particularly pronounced on the M1 due to the 50/50
| split. We reduced the number of workers on our test suite based
| on the CPU type and it sped up considerably.
| Synaesthesia wrote:
| I was quite impressed to learn that the E cores of the M1 are
| about as fast as an Intel i5 6600/i7 6700 CPU. And they've
| improved from there.
|
| That was literally my desktop CPU for a very long time.
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