It has been a long time since I last compared performance between CPU cores in Intel and Apple silicon Macs. This article compares six in-core measures of CPU performance across four different models, two with Intel processors, an M3 Pro, and an M4 Pro.

If you’re interested in comparing performance across mixed code modelling that in common apps, then look no further than Geekbench. The purpose of my tests isn’t to replicate those, but to gain insight into the CPU cores themselves, when running tight number-crunching loops largely using their registers and accessing memory as little as possible. This set of tests lays emphasis on those run at low Quality of Service (QoS), thus on the E cores of Apple silicon chips. Although those run relatively little user code, they are responsible for much of the background processing performed by macOS, and can run threads at high QoS when there are no free P cores available, although they do that at higher frequencies to deliver better performance.

Methods

Testing was performed on four Macs:

• iMac Pro 2017, 3.2 GHz 8-core Intel Xeon W, 32 GB memory, Sequoia 15.3.2;
• MacBook Pro 16-inch 2019, 2.3 GHz 8-core Intel Core i9, 16 GB memory, Sequoia 15.5;
• MacBook Pro 16-inch 2023, M3 Pro, 36 GB memory, Sequoia 15.5;
• Mac mini 2024, M4 Pro, 48 GB memory, Sequoia 15.5.

Six test subroutines were used in a GUI harness, as described in many of my previous articles. Normally, those include tests I have coded in Arm Assembly language, but for cross-platform comparisons I rely on the following coded in Swift:

• float mmul, direct calculation of 16 x 16 matrix multiplication using nested for loops on Floats.
• integer dot product, direct calculation of vector dot product on vectors of 4 Ints.
• simd_float4 calculation of the dot-product using simd_dot in the Accelerate library.
• vDSP_mmul, a function from the vDSP sub-library in Accelerate, multiplies two 16 x 16 32-bit floating point matrices, which in M1 and M3 chips appears to use the AMX co-processor;
• SparseMultiply, a function from Accelerate’s Sparse Solvers, multiplies a sparse and a dense matrix, and may use the AMX co-processor in M1 and M3 chips.
• BNNSMatMul matrix multiplication of 32-bit floating-point numbers, here in the Accelerate library, and since deprecated.

Source code for the last four is given in the appendix to this article.

Each test was run first in a single thread, then in four threads simultaneously. Loop throughput per second was calculated from the average time taken for each of the four threads to complete, and compared against the single thread to ensure it was representative. Results are expressed as percentages compared to test throughput at high QoS on the iMac Pro set at 100%. Thus a test result reported here as 200% indicates the cores being tested completed calculations in loops at twice the rate of those in the cores of the iMac Pro, so are ‘twice the speed’.

High QoS

User threads are normally run at high QoS, so getting the best performance available from the CPU cores. In Apple silicon chips, those threads are run preferentially on P cores at high frequency, although that may not be at the core’s maximum. Results are charted below.

Each cluster of bars here shows loop throughput for one test relative to the iMac Pro’s 3.2 GHz 8-core Xeon processor at 100%. Pale blue and red bars are for the two Intel Macs, the M3 Pro is dark blue, and the M4 Pro green. The first three tests demonstrate what was expected, with an increase in performance in the M3 Pro, and even more in the M4 Pro to reach about 200%.

Results from vDSP matrix multiplication are different, with less of an increase in the M3 Pro, and a reduction in the M4 Pro. This may reflect issues in the code used in the Accelerate library. That contrasts with the huge increases in performance seen in the last two tests, rising to a peak of over 400% in BNNS matrix multiplication.

With that single exception, P cores in recent Apple silicon chips are out-performing Intel CPU cores by wider margins than can be accounted for in terms of frequency alone.

Low QoS

When expressed relative to loop throughput at high QoS, no clear trend emerges in Apple silicon chips. This reflects the differences in handling of threads run at low QoS: as the Intel CPUs used in Macs only have a single core type, they can only run low QoS threads at lower priority on the same cores. In Apple silicon chips, low QoS threads are run exclusively on E cores running at frequencies substantially lower than their maximum, for energy efficiency. This is reflected in the chart below.

In the Intel Xeon W of the iMac Pro, low QoS threads are run at a fairly uniform throughput of about 45% that of high QoS threads, and in the Intel Core i9 that percentage is even lower, at around 35%. Throughput in Apple silicon E cores is more variable, and in the case of the last test, the E cores in the M4 Pro reach 66% of the throughput of the Intel Xeon at high QoS. Thus, Apple appears to have chosen the frequencies used to run low QoS threads in the E cores to deliver the required economy rather than a set level of performance.

Conclusions

• CPU P core performance in M3 and M4 chips is generally far superior to CPUs in late Intel Macs.
• Performance in M3 P cores is typically 160% that of a Xeon or i9 core, rising to 330%.
• Performance in M4 P cores is typically 190% that of a Xeon or i9 core, rising to 400%.
• Performance in E cores when running low QoS threads is more variable, and typically around 30% that of a Xeon or i9 core at high QoS, to achieve superior economy in energy use.
• On Intel processors running macOS Sequoia, low QoS threads are run significantly slower than high QoS threads, at about 45% (Xeon) or 30-35% (i9).

My apologies for omitting legends from the first version of the two charts, and thanks to @holabotaz for drawing my attention to that error, now corrected.

In computing, the term Quality of Service is widely used to refer to communication and network performance, but for Macs it has another more significant meaning, as the property that determines the performance of each thread run on your Mac, most importantly in Apple silicon chips.

Processes and threads

Each process running on your Mac consists of at least one thread. Threads are single flows of code execution run on one CPU core at a time, sharing virtual memory allocated to that process, but with their own stack. In addition to the process’s main thread, it can create additional threads as it requires, which can then be scheduled to run in parallel on different cores. As all recent Macs have more than one core, processes with more than one thread can make good use of more than one core, and so run faster.

Take the example of a file compressor. If it’s coded so that it can perform its compression in four threads that can be run simultaneously, then it will compress files in roughly a quarter of the time when it runs on four CPU cores, compared with running on a single core (ignoring input and output to disk).

That only works when those four cores are all free. If your Mac is also trying to build its Spotlight indexes at the same time, the threads doing that will compete with those of your compression app. That’s where the thread’s Quality of Service (QoS) settings come in, as they assign priority. On Apple silicon Macs, a thread’s QoS will also help determine whether it’s run on its Performance or Efficiency cores.

Standard QoS settings

QoS is set by the process, and is normally chosen from the standard list:

• QoS 9 (binary 001001), named background and intended for threads performing maintenance, which don’t need to be run with any higher priority.
• QoS 17 (binary 010001), utility, for tasks the user doesn’t track actively.
• QoS 25 (binary 011001), userInitiated, for tasks that the user needs to complete to be able to use the app.
• QoS 33 (binary 100001), userInteractive, for user-interactive tasks, such as handling events and the app’s interface.

There’s also a ‘default’ value of QoS between 17 and 25, an unspecified value, and in some circumstances you might come across others used by macOS.

These are the QoS values exposed to the programmer. Internally, macOS uses a more complex scheme with different values.

CPU core type

When running apps on Intel Macs, because all their CPU cores are identical, QoS has more limited effect, and is largely used to determine priority when there are threads queued for execution on a limited number of cores.

Apple silicon Macs are completely different, as they have two types of CPU core, Efficiency (E) cores designed to use less energy and normally run at lower frequencies, and Performance (P) cores that can run at higher frequencies and deliver maximum performance, but using more energy.

QoS is therefore used to determine which type of core a thread should be run on. Threads with a QoS of 9 (background) are run on E cores, and can’t be promoted to run on P cores, even when there are inactive P cores and the E cores are heavily loaded. Threads with a QoS of 17 and above will be preferentially run on P cores when they’re available, but when they’re all fully occupied, macOS will run them on E cores instead. In that case, the E cores will be run at higher frequencies for better performance with less economy.

If your Apple silicon Mac has a base variant chip with 4 E and 4 P cores, this results in the following:

• apps with a total of up to 4 threads at high QoS will be scheduled and run at full speed on the P cores;
• when those P cores are all busy with high QoS threads, running another thread will then result in that being run on the E cores, and slightly slower than it would on a P core;
• a total of 8 high QoS threads can thus be run on P and E cores together;
• when running low QoS background threads on E cores, a maximum of 4 can be run at any time when the E cores are available, but those threads can’t spill over and run on the P cores, even if those are idle.

Controls

As QoS is normally either set by the process for its threads, or for services in their LaunchDaemon or LaunchAgent property list, the user has little direct control. A few apps now provide settings to adjust the QoS of their worker threads. Among those in the compression utility Keka, together with a couple of my own utilities such as the Dintch integrity checker.

In Keka’s settings, you can give its tasks a maximum number of threads, and even run them at custom Quality of Service (QoS) if you want them to be run in the background on E cores, and not interrupt your work on P cores.

Dintch has a simple slider, with the green tortoise to run it on E cores alone, and the red racing car at full speed on the P cores.

App Tamer and taskpolicy

The great majority of threads run at low QoS on the E cores are those of macOS and its services like Spotlight indexing. When a thread has already been assigned a low QoS, there’s currently no utility or tool that can promote it so it’s run at a higher QoS. In practice this means that you can’t accelerate those tasks.

What you can do, though, is demote threads with higher QoS to run at low QoS, more slowly and in the background. The best way to do this is using St. Clair Software’s excellent utility App Tamer. If you prefer, you can use the taskpolicy command tool instead. For instance, the command
taskpolicy -b -p 567
will confine all threads of the process with PID 567 to the E cluster, and can be reversed using the -B option for threads with higher QoS (but not those set to low QoS by the process).

That can be seen in this CPU History window from Activity Monitor. An app has run four threads, two at low QoS and two at high QoS. In the left side of each core trace they are run on their respective cores, as set by their QoS. The app’s process was then changed using taskpolicy -b and the threads run again, as seen in the right. The two threads with high QoS are then run together with the two with low QoS in the four E cores alone.

Virtualisation

Although Game Mode does alter the effects of QoS and core allocation, its impact is limited. The one significant exception to the way that QoS works is in virtualisation.

macOS Virtual Machines running on Apple silicon chips are automatically assigned a high QoS, and run preferentially on P cores. Thus, even when running threads at low QoS, those are run within threads on the host’s P cores. This remains the only known method of electively running low QoS threads on P cores.

Key points

• Threads are single flows of code execution run on one CPU core at a time, sharing virtual memory allocated to that process, but with their own stack.
• Apps and processes set the Quality of Service (QoS) for each of the threads they run.
• On Apple silicon chips, low QoS of background results in that thread being run on E cores alone.
• Higher QoS threads are preferentially allocated to P cores, but when they aren’t available, that thread will be run on E cores at high frequency.
• Some apps now provide controls over the QoS of their worker threads.
• App Tamer and taskpolicy let you demote high QoS threads to be run with low QoS on the E cores, but can’t promote low QoS threads to run faster on P cores.
• Virtual machines run all threads at high QoS as far as the host Mac is concerned.

Further reading

Apple’s Energy Efficiency Guide for Mac Apps, last revised 13 September 2016, so without any mention of Apple silicon.
Apple silicon: 1 Cores, clusters and performance
Apple silicon: 2 Power and thermal glory
Apple silicon: 3 But does it save energy?