On: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

[gogopuppygogo]

There are various benchmarks on YouTube showing the performance is reasonable. Native code is obviously faster but with rosetta it seems like the M1 is a mid tier Core i5 or Ryzen 3 series in performance. Not bad at all but not top tier.

[andy_ppp → gogopuppygogo]

I mean it’s totally crazy, emulation of Arm on x86 has always felt extremely slow, to me anyway.

[Reason077 → andy_ppp]

Apple put some special sauce in the M1 to help make rosetta fast. Support for the x86 TSO memory model, for one thing.

[marcan_42 → Reason077]

Also ARM now has a bunch of instructions that are blatantly there for efficient x86 emulation, though ARM won't tell you that in the docs.

[jtl999 → marcan_42]

IBM POWER9 supports some memory ordering instructions that (as I understand) would in theory be useful for x86 emulation, but a) I'm unsure if anyone actually uses them and b) They are removed from POWER10

[saagarjha → marcan_42]

I don't think Apple generates those, though.

[gandutraveler → Reason077]

Can that secret sauce just be to slow down Intel based macs in the OS layer?