How Apple silicon CPUs control core frequencies and power use when running in Low Power mode. Includes M4 Pro and M3 Pro data, and estimates of energy requirements.
performance
Apple refers to Energy Modes and Power Modes, and despite older MacBook Pro models offering Low Power mode, tells us that isn’t what Low Power mode is now. Here are the observations and explanations.
Does your NAS need faster storage or a faster network? If you were to improve those, would throttling limit the performance of backups?
It’s well known that writing Time Machine backups to storage is throttled to slow them down. What’s the point of using faster SSDs that are more expensive if macOS stops them from being fast
Can you promote threads set to run on E cores so they run on P cores instead? Can you demote threads set to run on cores so they run in the background on E cores?
Why does compressing a 15 GB file within a sparse bundle run more slowly than would be expected from its write performance?
Why data compression is everyday, and how its performance problems can generalise into tasks of similar structure.
Why pay an extra $600 for a 2 TB internal SSD, after all fast external SSDs are cheaper. Maybe you need to check whether disk performance becomes a rate-limiting factor.
The CPU view in Activity Monitor is the starting point for tuning the performance of software. Here are its virtues, and a few vices to beware of when using it.
Discovering whether using more threads makes a task faster gives insight into where its performance is limited. How to use a VM to investigate this.
The Eclectic Light Company 