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"Because Macs with Intel processors can’t segregate their tasks onto different cores in the same way, when macOS starts to choke on something it affects user pr
by apexalpha 5y ago
"Because Macs with Intel processors can’t segregate their tasks onto different cores in the same way, when macOS starts to choke on something it affects user processes too."
Why is this? I understand that Intel chips don't use BIG/little but couldn't you assign all OS/background tasks to one core and leave the other cores for user tasks? Shouldn't the scheduler be able to do this?
- cogman10 5y agoProbably a fight with CPU frequency ramping. You could put all the tasks on one core, but then you risk the CPU frequency spiking when it shouldn't causing more power to be drawn than necessary. With slow light power cores, that's less of an issue.
- wmf 5y agoThe OS also controls the frequency so it could lock the background core(s) at low frequency.
- jtriangle 5y agoBecause they didn't design the OS to do that. You very well could lock a core or two at low freq/power and assign background tasks to that. It's not really a new or exotic idea. macOS doing this is a side effect of them needing to do so, with the added benefit of it actually making things nicer all around. They could very well do this on intel/amd chips to the same effect. The bummer is, we really don't know how good the silicon is, because nothing but macOS runs on it natively, so you can't really get an apples to apples comparison.