Can you replace an iMac Pro with a Mac Studio Max and Studio Display? For the last month I’ve been assessing this, and here’s my answer in full.
Apple silicon
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.
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.
Thunderbolt 5 isn’t available yet, and in any case will probably offer no more than 6 GB/s. So what is the way ahead for Apple in its successors to its M1 series chips?
Which of the external disks tested can be used to boot from? Do they work reliably with Secure Boot? Could you boot from an external hard disk?
Armed with just a couple of flashy Thunderbolt NVMe SSDs and his home-made benchmarking app, we discover whether Thunderbolt is any better than USB 3.x.
If apps control the Quality of Service, which sets how macOS allocates them to different processor cores in an M1 chip, how can we have any control?
From the 8 cores of the original M1 chip to the M1 Ultra’s 20, this is how macOS manages threads from apps, services and other code.
During the first 11.6 seconds of writing, speed was steady at 2 GB/s, then suddenly dropped to 0.7 GB/s. That’s thermal throttling for you.
Before deciding on internal and external storage, you need to be realistic about the performance it will achieve. Here are the numbers – and a couple of things we tend to forget about.
The Eclectic Light Company 