Why E cores make Apple silicon fast

Apple Silicon performance vs x86

• Many commenters report M-series laptops beating or matching high‑end Windows desktops for compiles and “heavy” work at far lower power, especially in single‑threaded tasks.
• There’s broad agreement that Apple leads in performance‑per‑watt and often in single‑core performance; in multicore, large AMD/Intel desktop parts with more cores and cache can “obliterate” Apple.
• Some argue Apple’s advantage is largely newer TSMC nodes and lots of cache, not magic ISA; others counter that the implementation details don’t matter—Apple shipped the fastest cores in practice for several years.

Perf per watt, thermals, and laptops

• MacBook Airs (M1–M5) are repeatedly praised as fanless, silent, and “competitive with desktops” for short bursts, though sustained heavy loads do throttle.
• Several users compare similar workloads on corporate Windows laptops vs Apple Silicon and see 2–3× better battery life and responsiveness on Macs—until corporate security agents (Defender, CrowdStrike, Zscaler, etc.) erode that advantage.
• Some note that Windows hardware can be fast, but noisy fans, aggressive boosting to high GHz, and poor power management make them feel worse in daily use.

Role of E‑cores, QoS, and scheduling

• The thread generally agrees with the article’s thesis: E‑cores handling background tasks free P‑cores for latency‑sensitive work, improving perceived snappiness.
• On macOS this is driven by QoS (quality‑of‑service) levels and libdispatch: background work is tagged low priority and routed to E‑cores; user‑initiated work gets P‑cores.
• Vouchers and IPC propagation let normally low‑priority daemons temporarily inherit high priority when serving a foreground request, improving responsiveness of a highly componentized system.

Benchmarks and comparisons

• There’s debate over whether Apple still “wins” in single‑core; some benchmarks show tiny gaps vs latest Intel/AMD, others still show Apple on top.
• Critics highlight vendor games: comparing high‑TDP Intel laptop SKUs against base M‑series, or focusing only on multicore scores.
• Others point out Linux or tuned Windows installs on the same x86 hardware can feel far faster than OEM Windows with bloat.

Everyday experience & OS issues

• Many describe Apple Silicon Macs as instantly waking, fast to open apps, and generally smoother than Intel Macs and most Windows laptops.
• Several say Linux desktops (especially KDE, minimalist setups) can feel even more “instant” than macOS, exposing macOS’s growing UI lag, animations, and Electron‑related jank.

Background processes, logging, and regressions

• The claim that “2,000+ threads in 600+ processes is good news” is heavily questioned. Critics see excessive daemons, noise, and energy use, plus hard‑to‑debug failures.
• Spotlight, iCloud, Photos, and iMessage are cited as examples where indexing/sync bugs can peg CPUs, fill logs, or make search unreliable.
• Some long‑time Mac users feel hardware has surged while macOS quality, performance, and UX consistency have regressed over recent releases.