In everyday practice, USERS of the M1 Mac will quickly notice that their ARM Mac is unusually fast. One of the main reasons has to do with the design of the new CPU.
Testing tools such as Geekbench clearly demonstrate that the M1 Mac is a very fast computer. But these tests usually tell you only half the story. They tell you how a machine performs under pressure, but what people notice is how the Mac performs in everyday use.
Despite the high Geekbench scores, some computer users may be disappointed with Intel macs, as is typical. But there are few complaints about performance degradation in normal use of the new M1 MAC, and it seems that performance is maintained in everyday use.
According to the developer, this is due to a little-known system feature: QOS or quality of service.
The new M1 Mac features asymmetric cores: four high performance (Icestorm) and four efficiency cores (Firestorm). Having both types of kernels ensures that background processes do not slow down the computer because there is always enough power available for the program.
This has a positive impact on the everyday use of reactive applications. Previously, even the fastest Mac users could experience delays when opening applications and other nasty performance degradations. Applications can be slowed down by system processes like iCloud in the background or indexing Photo or Spotlight.
This changes on M1 Macs, because if programmers use QOS, they can choose four fixed (or one automatic) levels for their applications on M1 Macs. For example, they can select “userInteractive” for image processing software, and “background” for online backup. Then, depending on the level they choose, these tasks are assigned to M1’s eight cores: backups using Time Machine only run on four efficiency cores, while image processing or spreadsheets have full access to four performance cores.
Almost all system functions on the M1 Mac run only through the efficiency kernel. You can see this if you open Active Monitor (Command + Space, type Active Monitor). Select Window from the menu, and then SELECT CPU Load History. Here, you’ll see eight boxes indicating utilization of the eight cores, divided into performance and efficiency cores.
The same concept exists in Intel Macs, where you can even assign higher or lower priorities to applications later, but it often happens again that background system processes suddenly slow down the applications you are working on.
Oakley conducted tests on Intel and M1 Macs and identified the main differences between the two systems: on Intel Macs, low-priority processes are typically allocated all available CPU power if no other processes are already using the CPU, and complete at maximum speed. On macs with M1, processes with low QOS run exclusively on the efficiency core.
Background processes run much slower than on Intel Macs, but users are unlikely to notice if Spotlight indexing or Time Machine backups take much longer than on Intel Macs. What he will notice is that because the application he uses to perform his work has four performance cores, he will have the best user experience.