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a) a different processor design than the M1
b) different RAM modules that Samsung doesn't have in existence, so who and what? or, a different chassis design...
I bet somehow, I'd still manage to get it to beachball on everyday common stuff like loading an IDE or Safari or something...
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The OS appears to partition the processors, like linux cpuset stuff, with low priority threads getting given to the efficiency cores, so you basically keep the low priority background stuff off the performant cores. How many is optimum is an interesting question, I would assume the apple peeps have a good idea and are on the money with this design.
it's not clear to me why the optimal number of efficiency cores wouldn't be zero on a desktop. why not just use the die area for additional performance cores? one or two full cores shouldn't have much effect on the thermal/power budget if they're just working on background tasks.
I bet somehow, I'd still manage to get it to beachball on everyday common stuff like loading an IDE or Safari or something...
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M1 mac pros were always going to come. Apple themselves announced that the next 2 years will be transition. I'd say if you purchased a Mac Pro, it's still the same. If you find yourself not having enough power, you bought the wrong machine to begin with (probably modern threadripper pro would be what you should have been looking for) If the computer satisfies all your performance needs, what use is it to "feel frustr…
> if you purchased a Mac Pro, it's still the same. If you find yourself not having enough power, you bought the wrong machine to begin with This is the reality really, if you actually wanted power then the Mac Pro just wasn't what you should have bought. Threadripper + Nvidia cards would take you way further for far less and with a clear sustainable upgrade path. Also really after the past 10 years of Apple's pro mov…
So far the answer seems to be, there is no getting around these CPU issues through tailoring the compiler flags etc. and the best people can get is amelioration of the problem, not getting it back on par with normally inferior Intel chips. Again, the issue is that the Threadripper stuff is eating unreasonable CPU and the Intel stuff, normally not as good, is not doing that.
I suspect what you're looking at there is a CPU architecture that's getting optimized for specific conditions, which my plugins don't meet. There seems no fix other than 'you should be playing Mass Effect on this computer instead'.
I'm sure that it would destroy the Intel computer if you're doing that, but generalizing that to all conditions seems not justified.
It says the split for performance versus efficiency cores will be: - 20 total, 16 high performance, 4 efficiency - 40 total, 32 high performance, 8 efficiency Which is kind of interesting given that the 8 core M1 is split half/half at 4 high performance, 4 efficiency. Sounds like perhaps MacOS doesn't typically have more than 4 cores worth of low-priority work, regardless of the system size/workload?
That seems a bit weird to me. Many programs are hard to multithread but I'd expect that if any given program can make effective use of 8 threads it can probably keep scaling to 16 and 32. The hard part is getting from 1 to 2 and 2 to 4. So I'd expect that in most cases having more than 8 high performance cores doesn't make that much sense.
Bad assumption. It's pretty difficult to write a multithreaded program that scales up to 32 cores. You have to carefully avoid all sources of process-wide contention. The only cases where it is easy to just keep adding cores are where the units of independent work are overwhelmingly large compared to everything else, like video compression.
As someone who just invested in a Mac Pro late last year, I'm a bit frustrated. I wanted years for a modular design that I could keep and upgrade over a longer time only to find out I'll be forcefully phased out within 2 years.
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Consider the use cases. The Mac Pro is a desktop, always plugged in and used for the power. The M1 is on a laptop running on a battery where efficiency is more important to improve the battery life.
So why put efficiency cores in the desktop processor at all?