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It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

blog.howardjohn.info

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Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#91

Post by brookst »

gruez wrote: post #84
sincerely wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of OPs posts in that thread are blatantly Chat GPT output

Because.. em-dashes? As many others have mentioned, ios/mac have auto em-dashes so it's not really a reliable indicator.

It’s so annoying that we’ve lost a legit and useful typographic convention just because some people think that AI overusing it means that all uses indicate AI.

Sure, I’ve stopped using em-dashes just to avoid the hassle of trying to educate people about a basic logical fallacy, but I reserve the right to be salty about it.

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#92

Post by brookst »

poink wrote: post #11

I generally agree you should buy fast machines, but the difference between my 5950x (bought in mid 2021. I checked) and the latest 9950x is not particularly large on synthetic benchmarks, and the real world difference for a software developer who is often IO bound in their workflow is going to be negligible If you have a bad machine get a good machine, but you’re not going to get a significant uplift going from a goo…

5950x is such a great platform. I can’t see replacing mine for several years at least.

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#93

Post by torginus »

diminish wrote: post #43

Multi-core operations like compiling C/C++ could benefit. Single thread performance of 16-core AMD Ryzen 9 9950X is only 1.8x of my poor and old laptop's 4-core i5 performance. https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/6211vs3830vs3947/AMD-Ry... I'm waiting for >1024 core ARM desktops, with >1TB of unified gpu memory to be able to run some large LLMs with Ping me when some builds this :)

I jumped ahead about 5 generations of Intel, when I got my new laptop and while the performance wasn't much better, the fact that I changed from a 10 pound workstation beast that sounded like a vacuum cleaner, to a svelte 13 inch laptop that works with a tiny USB C brick, and barely runs its fans while being just as fast made it worthwhile for me.

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#94

Post by brookst »

wqaatwt wrote: post #24
JSR_FDED wrote: post #5

> 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?

Apple doesn’t really make desktop CPUs, though. Just very good oversized mobile ones. For AMD/Intel laptop, desktop and server CPUs usually are based on different architectures and don’t have that much overlap.

What’s the difference between a M4 max and a “real” desktop processor?

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#95

Post by sweetjuly »

mft_ wrote: post #58
userbinator wrote: post #46

I wish developers, and I'm saying this as one myself, were forced to work on a much slower machine, to flush out those who can't write efficient code. Software bloat has already gotten worse by at least an order of magnitude in the past decade.

I came here to say exactly this. If developers are frustrated by compilation times on last-generation hardware, maybe take a critical look at the code and libraries you're compiling. And as a siblimg comment notes, absolutely all testing should be on older hardware, without question, and I'd add with deliberately lower-quality and -speed data connections, too.

This is one of the things which cheeses me the most about LLVM. I can't build LLVM on less than 16GB of RAM without it swapping to high heaven (and often it just gets OOM killed anyways). You'd think that LLVM needing >16GB to compile itself would be a signal to take a look at the memory usage of LLVM but, alas :)

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#96

Post by qwertytyyuu »

userbinator wrote: post #46

I wish developers, and I'm saying this as one myself, were forced to work on a much slower machine, to flush out those who can't write efficient code. Software bloat has already gotten worse by at least an order of magnitude in the past decade.

Yeah but working with windows, visual studio and cooperate security software in a 8gb machine is just pain

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#97

Post by dahart »

blueflow wrote: post #56

Dunno. I got a Ryzen 7 with 16 cores from 2021 and the modern web still doesn't render smoothly. Maybe its not the hardware?

Maybe, but I can’t repro. Do you have a GPU? What browser? What web site? How much RAM do you have, and how much is available? What else is running on your machine? What OS, and is it a work machine with corporate antivirus?

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#99

Post by brookst »

gloxkiqcza wrote: post #29
Sayrus wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 silicon only offers a low number of cores on desktop chips compared to what Intel or AMD offers. * 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.

Yeah i9-14900 and 9950x are better comparisons, at 24 and 16 cores respectively.

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#100

Post by ben-schaaf »

tgma wrote: post #27
kaspar030 wrote: post #12

> 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.

Not even. Probably closer to 30%, and that's if you are doing actual many-core compile workloads on your critical path.

Phoronix has actual benchmarks: https://www.phoronix.com/review/amd-ryzen-9950x-9900x/2

It's not 3x, but it's most certainly above 1.3x. Average for compilation seems to be around 1.7-1.8x.

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