Comment by reshlo

Comment by reshlo 6 days ago

1 reply

> Timer Coalescing attempts to enforce some order on all this chaos. While on battery power, Mavericks will routinely scan all upcoming timers that apps have set and then apply a gentle nudge to line up any timers that will fire close to each other in time. This "coalescing" behavior means that the disk and CPU can awaken, perform timer-related tasks for multiple apps at once, and then return to sleep or idle for a longer period of time before the next round of timers fire.[0]

> Specify a tolerance for the accuracy of when your timers fire. The system will use this flexibility to shift the execution of timers by small amounts of time—within their tolerances—so that multiple timers can be executed at the same time. Using this approach dramatically increases the amount of time that the processor spends idling…[1]

[0] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/06/how-os-x-mavericks-w...

[1] https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Pe...

miki123211 6 days ago

Modern Macs also have two different kinds of cores, slow but energy-efficient e-cores and high-performance p-cores.

The p cores can be activated and deactivated very quickly, on the order of microseconds IIRC, which means the processor always "feels" fast while still conserving battery life.