Yep, I think it's interesting to note how slow x86 was in general with refcounting even compared to the PowerPC era. It's something that showed early on quite

Yep, I think it's interesting to note how slow x86 was in general with refcounting even compared to the PowerPC era. It's something that showed early on quite a lot when you compared what was considered light usage at that point in time (say open Word and a couple of Safari tabs), a G4 wasn't ridiculous in those scenarios compared to the first Core 2 machines. While I'm sure the designers paid particular attention to those instructions, it's really x86 being a terrible instruction set than the other way around that create that particular refcounting gap I think.