The Apple M1, ARM/x86 Linux Virtualization, and Boinc | Hacker News Reader

The Apple M1, ARM/x86 Linux Virtualization, and Boinc

sevarg.net

19 pointsjseliger6 comments

> Should you buy one of Apple’s M1 devices? Probably not - wait 6 months for the next round of hardware, and buy then. Most of the software ecosystem quirks will be worked out by then, and just about everything will work. For now, there are enough weird little broken corner cases that I’d suggest holding off unless you’re OK with that and want legitimately insane battery life and performance.

Wise words.

That it changes cores only when the window becomes invisible is likely due to App Nap - check the energy tab in Activity Monitor.

https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Pe...

As all the well deserved criticism about the lack of support for alternative operating systems on M1 becomes louder, articles like these suggest Apple's answer - you want to run any other OS on it, virtualisation is our answer. (There's already another article on M1 here praising how well virtualised Windows runs on it).

I haven't seen mention of the memory bandwidth of the M1 before. Why is it so much faster than its contemporaries? Double width data path?

The unified architecture, combined with the speed of the modules (4266 MHz LPDDR4X), combined with the close physical proximity to the CPU cores likely all contribute to the M1's memory performance.

In Apple's own words:

“M1 also features our unified memory architecture, or UMA. M1 unifies its high‑bandwidth, low‑latency memory into a single pool within a custom package. As a result, all of the technologies in the SoC can access the same data without copying it between multiple pools of memory. This dramatically improves performance and power efficiency." [0]

[0] https://www.apple.com/mac/m1/

Probably the speed of the modules, the mbw[1] tool does copies to do its measurement, so the close proximity and reduced copies in the OS wouldn't be factors.

[1] https://github.com/raas/mbw

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