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I've seen more and more companies embrace cloud workstations. It is of course more expensive but that allows them to offer the latest and greatest to their employees without needing all the IT staff to manage a physical installation. Then your actual physical computer is just a dumb terminal.
In which movie ? "Microsoft fried movie" ? Cloud sucks big time. Not all engineers are web developers.
This is an "office" CPU. Workstation CPUs are called Epyc.
Employers, even the rich FANG types, are quite penny-wise and pound-foolish when it comes to developer hardware. Limiting the number and size of monitors. Putting speedbumps (like assessments or doctor's notes) on ergo accessories. Requiring special approval for powerful hardware. Requiring special approval for travel, and setting hotel and airfare caps that haven't been adjusted for inflation. To be fair, I know ple…
Google and Facebook I don't think are cheap for developers. I can speak firsthand for my past Google experience. You have to note that the company has like 200k employees and there needs to be some controls and not all of the company are engineers.
Hardware -> for the vast majority of stuff, you can build with blaze (think bazel) on a build cluster and cache, so local CPU is not as important. Nevertheless, you can easily order other stuff should you need to. Sure, if you go beyond the standard issue, your cost center will be charged and your manager gets an email. I don't think any decent manager would block you. If they do, change teams. Some powerful hardware that needs approval is blanket whitelisted for certain orgs that recognize such need.
Trips -> Google has this interesting model you have a soft cap for trips and if you don't hit the cap, you pocket half of the trips credit in your account which you can choose to spend later when you are overcap or you want to get something slightly nicer the next time. Also, they have clear and sane policies on mixing personal and corporate travel. I encourage everyone to learn about and deploy things like that in their companies. The caps are usually not unreasonable, but if you do hit them, it is again an email to your management chain, not some big deal. Never seen it blocked. If your request is reasonable and your manager is shrugging about this stuff, that should reflect on them being cheap not the company policy.
> 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?
For AMD/Intel laptop, desktop and server CPUs usually are based on different architectures and don’t have that much overlap.
I've seen more and more companies embrace cloud workstations. It is of course more expensive but that allows them to offer the latest and greatest to their employees without needing all the IT staff to manage a physical installation. Then your actual physical computer is just a dumb terminal.
The limiting factor on high-end laptops is their thermal envelope. Get the better CPU as long as it is more power efficient. Then get brands that design proper thermal solutions.
> Top end CPUs are about 3x faster than the comparable top end models 3 years ago I wish that were true, but the current Ryzen 9950 is maybe 50% faster than the two generations older 5950, at compilation workloads.
> 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.
* Apple: 32 cores (M3 Ultra)
* AMD: 96 cores (Threadripper PRO 9995WX)
* Intel: 60 cores (W‑9 3595X)
I wouldn’t exactly call that low, but it is lower for sure. On the other hand, the stated AMD and Intel CPUs are borderline server grade and wouldn’t be found in a common developer machine.
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.