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Comment by kiratp | Hacker News Reader

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.

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.

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> 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.

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.

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