Tuning your Mac for performance can be a good investment of time. Beware of general benchmarks, though, and develop your own objective measurements. Then identify the rate-limiting step methodically, so you can address that.
Geekbench
Set up from unboxing in under 2 hours, its CPU cores perform better than those in the M3, differences that are magnified.
Virtualisation of macOS on Apple silicon does deliver performance that’s impressively close to that of the host. Here are the figures to demonstrate it.
Select a test, time it, and compare the result with those from other systems. Choose whether to use a synthetic or application benchmark, and don’t forget your confirmation bias.
Which is faster, a MacBook Pro 16-inch with an M1 Pro, or a Mac Studio with an M1 Max? Tests cover P and E cores, Neural Engine, SSD and more.
The E cores on the original M1 and M1 Pro chips appear to be managed quite differently, with respect to the performance of background processes at low QoS.
Obtaining estimates for individual P and E core performance of processes run mainly in an ALU and those using floating-point and SIMD gives further insight and confirms the cores haven’t changed from M1 to M1 Pro.
How does macOS load processes onto the cores in M1 series processors? Are its policies similar between the original M1 and the M1 Pro?
Geekbench 5 scores for the M1 Pro are around 2800 single- and 12500 multi-core. Do they represent maximum performance, though?
How to connect your M1 Mac in Target Disk mode, avoiding an endless restart loop, and how fast to expect it to perform. Plus more on benchmarks.
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