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Hashes in the secret sauce
ON THE FACE OF IT, an Intel i9 processor with eight cores running at 2.4GHz should be a little slower than an M1 with a mere four Performance cores at 3.2GHz. Yet, for some critical tasks, even the M1’s slower Efficiency cores are quicker than the Intel.
Among those is the computation of hashes as signatures of the code inside apps. Those are recalculated to check the integrity of code and other resources, both when launching an app and loading its code into memory for execution. That explains why you will see fewer bounces of app icons in the Dock of an Apple silicon Mac, and is another reason that apps feel more nimble once they’re running. Those differences prove to be even greater when you have an M3 or M4, as they have the ability to hash more than five times faster than the Intel chip.