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.
performance
In a wide range of in-core tests, CPU performance in VMs is close to that of code running native on the host, and M3 VMs are faster than M1 native. With one significant exception.
How have the CPUs in our Macs become faster since the Macintosh 128K was launched by Steve Jobs forty years ago?
M3 chips widen the gap between Pro and Max variants. They also change relative performance between P and E cores to make M3 CPUs more versatile.
The M1 cycle took 16 months from basic to Ultra; that shortened to 12 months for the M2. As the first Studio M2 Ultras were being prepared for shipping, the M3 cycle started.
A strange observation, that the last thread to complete a matrix multiplication task was always much later than others, explored to discover a different strategy used by macOS.
Comparison between 2 Intel and 2 Apple silicon Macs running vector and matrix functions from Apple’s Accelerate library. Was that new M3 worth the money?
There’s more to getting best performance and energy efficiency on Apple silicon. These vary greatly depending on how apps are coded, as shown here.
If Apple offered to do much of the hard work of coding your app for you for free, and to optimise it for different Mac hardware, how could you refuse?
How to compare an undocumented if not secret co-processor? Using different tests that use very high power, and can result in strange patterns of core allocation. So how does the M3 Pro fare here?
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