3 ms·
I do wonder if they stopped optimizing for Intel once it was clear they were going to release apple CPU based Macs. I don’t have one personally, but I’ve tested
by atty 6y ago
I do wonder if they stopped optimizing for Intel once it was clear they were going to release apple CPU based Macs. I don’t have one personally, but I’ve tested a family member’s M1 MacBook Air, and it’s the most responsive laptop I’ve ever used. My 2019 MacBook Pro, on the other hand, feels... Just fine. And GPU performance for sure is far better under bootcamp. I pretty much exclusively play games in bootcamp, even if there’s a Mac version.
- carlhjerpe 6y agoI don't think there's that many places in MacOS where they write hand optimised assembly for either architecture. Looking at rust it seems like LLVM is optimising a lot of languages (specially that apple uses). This is platform independent. The M1 is supposedly really fast, but it's not like they optimise userspace for either architecture. Booting is different on the M1, but once the kernel is alive and well it's just RISC vs CISC.
- saagarjha 6y agoOf course a number of system libraries do get platform-specific optimizations.
- carlhjerpe 6y agoSure, but those are usually written in a compiled language that LLVM will pass over anyways, generating optimised code. My point is that this all "mac is optimised for the hardware" "nonsense" is very non-techy. Sure they don't need to worry about drivers the same way, but it's still x86 or arm, people already target these so it's just about whose code and architecture is the better.
- luke2m 6y agoThat could add to the perceived huge performance gains on the M1.
- saagarjha 6y agoMost of the engineers are still using Intel Macs, so I doubt it.