This is such an ugly hack...
I would think when the last of Apple’s hardware moves to ARM they’ll ensure there’s enough onboard battery to ensure the flushes happen reliably across form factors even if there’s a power cut.
If anything, now that the reason for the performance difference has been identified, I’d hope to see numbers for Linux and Windows storage access come up to par with these numbers as they go down this road too (e.g. via the NVME flush toggle mentioned in the article).
Trading correctness for performance without shouting at the users "YOUR DATA IS NOT SAFE WHEN YOU DO THIS" multiple times a day in a storage is benchmark-snake-oil. Period.
My point above was that the same “cheat” (to use your word) could be applied to the unbranded SSD too, with similar performance gains.
I’m not giving Apple a pass for low flush performance, I’m saying there’s nothing I can see here that’s uniquely available to Apple that would prevent others from deferring flushes in the same way for similar performance gains - which would make sense in many cases.
So there's that.
It's rather Apple's slow drive firmware checks though, that is problematic.
That's not the reason for the M1 performance differences (as a CPU).
Just for the disk writing (which isn't the fastest around to begin with anyway).