4 ms·

This is what I would have expected - I suggested when the M1 was first mentioned that it might make more sense for the Mac Pro to just have a side wall of separ

This is what I would have expected - I suggested when the M1 was first mentioned that it might make more sense for the Mac Pro to just have a side wall of separate independent SOC stacks with independent on-thread memory that GCD could manage behind the scenes. This seems like a much more straight-forward way to throw more performance into the higher-end machines without making long-tail disruptions to the architecture. The efficiency cores are essentially for when the system is idling or for the 95% case (browsing the web, watching YouTube and checking e-mails). If a task is performance-bottlenecked then it makes sense to go straight to maximum performance rather than any in-between combination as you're essentially either waiting for the computer or not (i.e. it probably doesn't make much sense to try to strike an efficiency balance for tasks that are stressing a minimal set of low-power cores when they need to be completed either way - and in a machine where there's no battery life to worry about).

andrewmcwatters 5y ago
> browsing the web, watching YouTube I know people say this all the time, but the reality is modern web browsers are incredibly expensive processors.
- acqq 5y ago
  Yes, and it's also because a 2 KB text today comes inside of megabytes of code that has to be executed, and some code is additionally very expensive to execute, as it's doing shady stuff in trying to fulfill all the promises of all ad companies involved, sometimes really hundreds for a single page. There was a moment in web history when the same happened due to the flash-based ads which easily spent huge amounts of CPU for... nothing meaningful to the reader. Now the flash is gone, but the pattern repeated. And even not counting all the ads, today's "hot" web development conventions are often making the CPU even hotter.
  - headmelted 5y ago
    This right here. It's like there's this assumption that the web's simple serving of HTML was a compromise of the time rather than it's killer feature. I don't want to sift through hundreds of images and outbound links from the ads you're trying to trick me into clicking, I just want the information I came for or I'm gone forever.
agloeregrets 5y ago
Generally speaking, Apple's systems throw work like web browsing to the performance cores. Browsing the web is actually super intensive for very short periods of time, increasing performance of rendering makes the system feel snappier. They mastered this art in the iPhone as they had to learn how to make snappy feeling devices that also sipped power, the easiest way to do this is to be done with processing as fast as possible so you can get back to idling on just the E-cores. The E-core magic trick is that they are always running and also exist to prevent thread stoppers, tasks that force you to pause high-priority work such as network requests, push notifications, or memory management. This enables a machine where the performance cores can pound away at tasks uninterrupted and your cache can stay dedicated to the task at hand, preventing situations where you may have to dump branches mid-process, increasing performance consistency. Mathematically, it works out to where the P cores are ~5.2W each and then the E-cores are less than that combined, allowing the system to idle on just e-Cores and spin up and dedicate P-Cores to the UI and UX intensive tasks, keeping the thermals low and performance high. In a situation like the Mac Pro, I would expect much, much hotter P-Cores too as the thermals will allow.
bertmuthalaly 5y ago
A nitpick but arguably an important one for your point - this article argues that the efficiency cores aren’t for “browsing the web / watching YouTube / checking emails” but for non-interactive tasks like Spotlight indexing (based on GCD scheduling priority). https://eclecticlight.co/2021/05/17/how-m1-macs-feel-faster-than-intel-models-its-about-qos/ https://eclecticlight.co/2021/05/17/how-m1-macs-feel-faster-...
- MR4D 5y ago
  > tasks like Spotlight indexing <personal rant> I'd swear that Spotlight indexing would prefer a freaking supercomputer when it runs. My whole system just starts to feel sluggish, especially if I just moved a bunch (say 1-5GB) of files onto my system and not it wants to index them. </rant>

andrewmcwatters 5y ago

> browsing the web, watching YouTube I know people say this all the time, but the reality is modern web browsers are incredibly expensive processors.

acqq 5y ago
Yes, and it's also because a 2 KB text today comes inside of megabytes of code that has to be executed, and some code is additionally very expensive to execute, as it's doing shady stuff in trying to fulfill all the promises of all ad companies involved, sometimes really hundreds for a single page. There was a moment in web history when the same happened due to the flash-based ads which easily spent huge amounts of CPU for... nothing meaningful to the reader. Now the flash is gone, but the pattern repeated. And even not counting all the ads, today's "hot" web development conventions are often making the CPU even hotter.
- headmelted 5y ago
  This right here. It's like there's this assumption that the web's simple serving of HTML was a compromise of the time rather than it's killer feature. I don't want to sift through hundreds of images and outbound links from the ads you're trying to trick me into clicking, I just want the information I came for or I'm gone forever.

agloeregrets 5y ago

Generally speaking, Apple's systems throw work like web browsing to the performance cores. Browsing the web is actually super intensive for very short periods of time, increasing performance of rendering makes the system feel snappier. They mastered this art in the iPhone as they had to learn how to make snappy feeling devices that also sipped power, the easiest way to do this is to be done with processing as fast as possible so you can get back to idling on just the E-cores. The E-core magic trick is that they are always running and also exist to prevent thread stoppers, tasks that force you to pause high-priority work such as network requests, push notifications, or memory management. This enables a machine where the performance cores can pound away at tasks uninterrupted and your cache can stay dedicated to the task at hand, preventing situations where you may have to dump branches mid-process, increasing performance consistency. Mathematically, it works out to where the P cores are ~5.2W each and then the E-cores are less than that combined, allowing the system to idle on just e-Cores and spin up and dedicate P-Cores to the UI and UX intensive tasks, keeping the thermals low and performance high. In a situation like the Mac Pro, I would expect much, much hotter P-Cores too as the thermals will allow.

bertmuthalaly 5y ago

A nitpick but arguably an important one for your point - this article argues that the efficiency cores aren’t for “browsing the web / watching YouTube / checking emails” but for non-interactive tasks like Spotlight indexing (based on GCD scheduling priority). https://eclecticlight.co/2021/05/17/how-m1-macs-feel-faster-than-intel-models-its-about-qos/ https://eclecticlight.co/2021/05/17/how-m1-macs-feel-faster-...

MR4D 5y ago
> tasks like Spotlight indexing <personal rant> I'd swear that Spotlight indexing would prefer a freaking supercomputer when it runs. My whole system just starts to feel sluggish, especially if I just moved a bunch (say 1-5GB) of files onto my system and not it wants to index them. </rant>