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A comment on Memory access on the Apple M1 processor. Parent comment

Re:Memory access on the Apple M1 processor by TYPE_FASTER on Wednesday January 06, 2021 @02:33PM (#25661275)
Apple has been iterating on their proprietary mobile ARM-based processors since 2010, and has gotten really good at it. I would imagine that producing billions of consumer devices with these chips has helped give them a lot of experience in shortened time frame.

I also wonder if having the hardware and software both worked on in-house is an advantage. I mean, if you're developing power management software for a mobile OS, and you're using a 3rd-party vendor, then you read the documentation, and work with the vendor if you have questions. If it's all internal, you call them, and could make suggestions on future processor design too based on OS usage statistics and metrics.

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Re:Memory access on the Apple M1 processor by simonh on Thursday January 07, 2021 @10:36AM (#25672166)
In fact there is clear evidence of this with M1. It has optimised instructions to speed up retain/release of NSObject subclasses, which is a frequent operation on almost all Objective-C and Swift classes. They also designed the M1 to support a memory management profile used by x86 (and not ARM) to accelerate Rosetta translated binaries. I'm sure there are more.
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