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Activity Monitor

Making the most of Apple silicon power: 5 User control

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.

October 20, 2022 Macs, Technology

Making the most of Apple silicon power: 4 Frequency

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?

October 17, 2022 Macs, Technology

Making the most of Apple silicon power: 3 Controls

Threads, GCD and core allocation in Apple silicon explained. How thread priority is baked into code, and how important it is to performance.

October 13, 2022 Macs, Technology

Making the most of Apple silicon power: 2 Core capabilities

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.

October 5, 2022 Macs, Technology

Activity Monitor: meanings and misleadings

How to interpret various measurements reported in Activity Monitor, from % CPU to Energy Impact, and how they can be compared across different Macs.

August 13, 2022 Macs, Technology

Getting more from Activity Monitor: Memory

All about memory: different types, Unified Memory, Mach zones and the kernel, and how to manage system memory problems.

August 10, 2022 Macs, Technology

Dealing with the insomniac Mac

T T Read More

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.

June 30, 2022 Macs, Technology

Running tasks on E cores can use a third of the energy of P cores

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.

May 3, 2022 Macs, Technology

Don’t trust Activity Monitor on M1 Macs

Using CPU % or Energy values in Activity Monitor appears to show that running code on E cores is less efficient than on P cores. Don’t believe a word of it.

May 2, 2022 Macs, Technology

Making sense of M1 memory use

How can you tell how much memory is being used by the GPU when both CPU and GPU use Unified Memory? Does it matter anyway?

March 1, 2022 Macs, Technology

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