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I’m a reluctant hardware upgrader, but finally got an Apple Silicon machine. And I’m really, really noticing what others have said:

It’s snappy. Very snappy.

It’s snappy in a way that raw speed can’t explain. My perfectly fast Intel machine has lots of little pauses and lurches and burbles that are just…gone. Waking, launching things, plugging in the external display, all just poof! happen.

@inthehands the os optimizes background tasks to run on performance cores, and in many cases, will prevent those low level tasks from running on a performance core.

If you have a threaded web browser and you are switching back and forth between that and your IDE, and the OS kicks off a check for updates, then spotlight indexing in the background, and who knows what else, the OS tasks will not be preempting your work

I only notice slowdowns when I run out of ram. Not the case on Intel.

Paul Cantrell

@crazybutable
Yeah, I do wonder in particular whether core allocation + different memory model + some kind of reduced IO contention for the drive specifically makes Spotlight cause fewer hiccups. “Oops, gotta wait for mdworker for a sec here” would fit the flavor of many of the minor performance hiccups of the Intel machines.

@inthehands think of how many cron jobs are on your system. Gotta check Apple News. Gotta calculate your weekly screen time. Gotta update the battery percentage in the menu bar. Whoopsy-doodle, a new Bluetooth device is in range. You just clicked save on your document and MacOS needs to recalculate the file icon on the desktop

On an intel system you are evicting a critical function from a core, dumping the cache, etc, to run each tiny task, then you gotta hoist your work back into the cache etc

@inthehands I did read an interesting article on just how CPU core agnostic the intel scheduler was (and had to be) and how it affected performance, compared to Apple Silicon.

Tried looking for it now, can’t find it. But I did see some folks point out Apple silicon also has a media engine for decoding video and audio codecs (taking those tasks off of the CPU and GPU) and the neural engine (Mac OS uses that for several features but on Intel machines that has to run on the GPU/CPU as well.)