[kwlug-disc] about silicon

Raymond Chen raymondchen625 at gmail.com
Sun Dec 13 07:12:56 EST 2020


Found a nice blog post explaining why M1 is fast.
https://debugger.medium.com/why-is-apples-m1-chip-so-fast-3262b158cba2


On Sat, Dec 12, 2020 at 18:57 Doug Moen <doug at moens.org> wrote:

> Rust provides both Atomic Reference Counting (called Arc) and non-atomic
> Reference Counting (called Rc). You choose the one that makes sense.
> Hopefully the type system complains if you use Rc in a context where
> atomicity is required, but I don't use Rust. C++ provides only atomic
> refcounting in the standard library; for the other kind you roll your own
> (which I have done).
>
> On Sat, Dec 12, 2020, at 6:31 PM, Mikalai Birukou via kwlug-disc wrote:
>
> <moving into discussing silicon and near it>
>
> Another trick is that Apple's dev languages and frameworks (Swift and
> Objective-C) use reference counting, which requires atomic increments and
> decrements. On Intel, these operations are five times slower than
> non-atomic operations; on Apple Silicon they run at the same speed. This is
> something I wish the other CPU vendors would get right, because refcounting
> has some technical advantages over tracing GC, and I use it in software I
> write. C++ and Rust, both "performance" languages, provide refcounting but
> not tracing GC.
>
> Regarding M1. My Understanding is that placement of RAM inside of
> processor package/silicon is the trick that makes it run fast. Is there
> anything else?
>
>  The Apple M1 looks decent, but since Apple no longer lets you run Linux
> on their hardware, I have no desire to ever buy one.
>
> Does Rust standard refcounting, or implementation of such pointers need to
> use atomic in/decrements? Can't it use non-atomic something, given a more
> detailed knowledge of ownership? Just wondering.
>
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