11–20 of 522 posts
If you have a bad machine get a good machine, but you’re not going to get a significant uplift going from a good machine that’s a few years old to the latest shiny
I wish that were true, but the current Ryzen 9950 is maybe 50% faster than the two generations older 5950, at compilation workloads.
This article skips a few important steps - how a faster CPU will have a demonstrable improvement on developer performance. I would agree with the idea that faster compile times can have a significant improvement in performance. 30s is long enough for a developer to get distracted and go off and check their email, look at social media, etc. Basically turning 30s into 3s can keep a developer in flow. The critical thing…
I think just having LSP give you answers 2x faster would be great for staying in flow.
This article skips a few important steps - how a faster CPU will have a demonstrable improvement on developer performance. I would agree with the idea that faster compile times can have a significant improvement in performance. 30s is long enough for a developer to get distracted and go off and check their email, look at social media, etc. Basically turning 30s into 3s can keep a developer in flow. The critical thing…
Now in the tfa they compare laptop to desktop so I guess the title should be “you should buy two computers”
It doesn't have to be the cloud, but having a couple of ginormous machines in a rack where the fans can run at jet engine levels seems like a no-brainer.
> Desktop CPUs are about 3x faster than laptop CPUs Maybe that’s an AMD (or even Intel) thing, but doesn’t hold for Apple silicon. I wonder if it holds for ARM in general?
* "people" generally don't spend their time compiling the Linux kernel, or anything of the sort.
* For most daily uses, current-gen CPUs are only marginally faster than two generations back. Not worth spending a large amount of money every 3 years or so.
* Other aspects of your computer, like memory (capacity mostly) and storage, can also be perf bottlenecks.
* If, as a developer, you're repeatedly compiling a large codebase - what you may really want is a build farm rather than the latest-gen CPU on each developer's individual PC/laptop.
Even better way to improve the quality of your computer sessions is "Just use Mac." Apple is so much ahead at the performance curve.
They have good performance, especially per watt, for a laptop. Certainly not ahead of the curve when considering server hardware.
Server hardware is not very portable. Reserving a c7i.large is about $0.14/hour, this would equal the cost of an MBP M3 64GB in about two years.
Apple have made a killer development machine, I say this as a person who does not like Apple and macOS.
> Desktop CPUs are about 3x faster than laptop CPUs Maybe that’s an AMD (or even Intel) thing, but doesn’t hold for Apple silicon. I wonder if it holds for ARM in general?
The author is talking about multi-core performance rather than single core. Apple silicon only offers a low number of cores on desktop chips compared to what Intel or AMD offers. Ampere offers chips than are an order of magnitude faster in multi-core but they are not exactly "desktop" chips. But they are a good data point to say it can be true for ARM if the offer is here.
This article skips a few important steps - how a faster CPU will have a demonstrable improvement on developer performance. I would agree with the idea that faster compile times can have a significant improvement in performance. 30s is long enough for a developer to get distracted and go off and check their email, look at social media, etc. Basically turning 30s into 3s can keep a developer in flow. The critical thing…
IO bound compiler would be weird. Memory, perhaps, but newer CPUs also tend to be able to communicate with RAM faster, so... I think just having LSP give you answers 2x faster would be great for staying in flow.
Applies to git operations as well.