Virtual CPU cores are of one type, and QoS has no effect in virtualised macOS. This has consequences for both the host and guest macOS.
Activity Monitor
Many apps could benefit users of Apple silicon Macs by giving them controls over core use by their threads. Here’s how that can be done simply and effectively.
How you can use the taskpolicy command to confine all the threads of a process to the E cores, as a brake, but there’s no accelerator in macOS.
How can the two E cores in an M1 Pro or Max equal performance of the four in the original M1? Why does running two threads complete in half the time taken to run one?
Threads, GCD and core allocation in Apple silicon explained. How thread priority is baked into code, and how important it is to performance.
P cores are conventional in that they can deliver excellent performance at maximum frequency, but with high power use. E cores may take 4 times as long for a task, but use less than a third of the energy.
How to interpret various measurements reported in Activity Monitor, from % CPU to Energy Impact, and how they can be compared across different Macs.
All about memory: different types, Unified Memory, Mach zones and the kernel, and how to manage system memory problems.
What to do with the Mac that either won’t go to sleep at all, or keeps waking up and discharging its battery? It’s pmset or Sleep Aid.
Using a test of compressing a 1 GB file with AppleArchive, measurements of power used by core clusters show how efficient using the E cores really is.
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