> Exposing my limited understanding of that level of the computing stack - it is but Apple seems to have very very good caching strategies - filesystem and L1/2/3.
That would mean that these comparisons between Threadripper and the M1 Ultra do not reflect CPU performance but instead showcase whatever choice of SSD they've been using.
Re:Apple M1 Ultra
by LordDragonfang on Tuesday March 08, 2022 @06:05PM
(#30608571)
L1/2/3 are CPU caches, not SSD. Though there is a good chance these are mostly firmware optimizations, not hardware. So still not an apples-to-apples comparison of cpu design.
By firmware you mean microcode, but I don't think either of those actually use microcode to control this.
> L1/2/3 are CPU caches, not SSD.
Why did you omit the reference to "file system"?
Are we supposed to ignore the fact that a linker's main job is reading object files and write the output to a file?
I find this sort of argument particularly comical given a very old school technique to speed up compilation is to use a RAM drive to store the build's output.
https://llvm.org/devmtg/2017-10/slides/Ueyama-lld.pdf
There is a breakdown in those slides discussing what parts of lld are single threaded and hard to parallelize so I suspect single thread performance plays a big role too. I generally observe one core pegged during linking.