Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

Re:Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery by valuearb on Wednesday November 25, 2020 @11:12AM (#25210735)

Yea, this is a BS theory. I have a 16Gb M1 MacBook Air and the real answer is that it has super fast SSD access, so you don’t notice the first few gigabytes of swap.

But when swap hits 8-9 Gb, it’s effects start to get very noticeable.

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Re:Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery by Decade on Wednesday November 25, 2020 @04:23PM (#25214450)

This seems correct. RC vs GC might explain how a Mac full of NSObjects needs less memory than a Windows full of .NET runtimes, but it doesn’t explain how M1 Mac with 16GB of RAM is faster than x86 Mac with 16GB or more of RAM.

Besides, a lot of memory usage is in web browsers, which must use garbage collection.

Looking at the reviews of M1 Macs, those systems are still responsive and making forward progress at a “memory pressure” that would make my x86 Mac struggle in a swap storm. It seems to come down to very fast access to RAM and storage, large on-die caches, and perhaps faster memory compression.

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Re:Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery by tedd4u on Wednesday November 25, 2020 @10:12PM (#25216503)

Oh one more thing, they said in the Apple Silicon event that they had eliminated a lot of the need for copying RAM around so … could be some actual footprint reduction there?

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Re:Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery by tedd4u on Wednesday November 25, 2020 @09:05PM (#25216227)

I tend to agree! I think Big Sur on M1 uses 16kB page size vs 4kB on Intel so maybe that contributes to more efficient / less obvious perf issue when swapping.

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