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0 pointsbrucethemoose23y ago0 comments

Rembrandt is excellent... on linux, if you throttle it.

The main issue is that AMD/Intel turbo so hard, while Apple clocks their M chips much more conservatively. They are also much bigger, wider designs than AMD (which means they are more expensive but can afford to run slower).

Another is that Windows + OEM garbage + random background apps do so much useless processing in the background. And I'm not even a pro-linux "bloat" zealot... it really is just senseless and unacceptable out-of-the-box.

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josephg3y ago· 4 in thread

> Another is that Windows + OEM garbage + random background apps do so much useless processing in the background. And I'm not even a pro-linux "bloat" zealot... it really is just senseless and unacceptable out-of-the-box.

Modern MacOS is nearly as bad. I upgraded a couple of years ago from a dual core 2016 macbook pro. The machine - even freshly formatted - spent an obscene amount of CPU time doing useless things - like in photoanalysisd (presumably looking for my face in my iphoto library for the 100th time). Or indexing my hard drive again, for no reason.

The efficiency cores in my new M1 machine seem to hover at about 50% most of the time I'm using the computer. I've started to think of them as the silly corner for Apple's bored software engineers to play around in, so the random background processes they start don't get in the way of getting actual work done.

I wish I could figure out how to turn all this crap off. Its no wonder linux on M1 chips is already benchmarking better than the same machines running MacOS, at least on CPU bound tasks.

(That said, OEM bloatware on windows is a whole other level of hurt.)

brucethemoose2OP3y ago

Oof, I didn't know it was that bad.

On the other hand, a low frequency efficiency core is a good place for "bloat" to live. I think thats how Android/iOS remain usable too.

Windows bloat on AMD runs on the big 4Ghz+ cores. And I suspect it does on Intel laptops with E cores too, as Windows isn't integrated enough to know that the Adobe updater and Norton Antivirus and the HP App Store are E core tasks. And even if it does, Intel runs their E cores faster than Apple anyway.

heavyset_go3y ago

> I wish I could figure out how to turn all this crap off.

If anyone knows how, I'd love to know.

astrange3y ago

sudo mdutil -i off -a

Don't go complaining when things don't work though. And don't turn things off and forget you did it either.

I instead suggest not caring what `top` says for the day after an OS update. It'll take care of itself.

peoplefromibiza3y ago

> Modern MacOS is nearly as bad

The advantage there is that Apple knows exactly what HW is running on and can take advantage of every power save opportunity, while on x86 that's much harder.

api3y ago

M can be wider because it’s easy to decode ARM in parallel. X86 parallel decode becomes exponentially harder with more width due to crazy instruction length rules.

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