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It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

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Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#191

Post by JonChesterfield »

arp242 wrote: post #127
JonChesterfield wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fastest threadripper on the market is usually a good bet. Worth considering mini-pc on vesa mount / in a cable tray + fast machine in another room. Also, I've got a gmktec here (cheaper one playing thin client) and it's going to be scrapped in the near future because the monitor connections keep dropping. Framework make a 395 max one, that's tempting as a small single machine.

Threadripper is complete overkill for most developers and hella expensive especially at the top end. May also not even be that much faster for many work-loads. The 9950X3D is the "normal top-end" CPU to buy for most people.

Whether ~$10k is infeasibly expensive or a bargain depends strongly on what workloads you're running. Single threaded stuff? Sure, bad idea. Massively parallel set suites backed by way too much C++, where building it all has wound up on the dev critical path? The big machine is much cheaper than rearchitecting the build structure and porting to a non-daft language.

I'm not very enamoured with distcc style build farms (never seem to be as fast as one hopes and fall over a lot) or ccache (picks up stale components) so tend to make the single dev machine about as fast as one can manage, but getting good results out of caching or distribution would be more cash-efficient.

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#192

Post by thunderfork »

renewiltord wrote: post #164
miiiiiike wrote: post #159

Depends on the workload. I spent a few grand building a new machine with a 24-core CPU. And, while my gcc Docker builds are MUCH faster, the core Angular app still builds a few seconds slower than on my years old MacBook Pro. Even with all of my libraries split into atoms, built with Turbo, and other optimizations. 6-10 seconds to see a CSS change make its way from the editor to the browser is excruciating after a fe…

Web development is crazy. Went from a Java/C codebase to a webdev company using TS. The latter would take minutes to build. The former would build in seconds and you could run a simulated backtest before the web app would be ready. It blew my mind. Truly this is more complicated than trading software.

A lot of this seems to have gotten a lot better with esbuild for me, at least, and maybe tsgo will be another big speed-up once it's done...

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#193

Post by unethical_ban »

brookst wrote: post #92
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.

I enjoy building PCs so I've tried to justify upgrading my 5800x to a 9950x3d. But I really absolutely cannot justify it right now. I can play doom dark ages at 90fps 4k. I don't need it!

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#194

Post by toast0 »

Aurornis wrote: post #130
hamdingers wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I previously worked at a company where everyone got a budget of ~$2000. The only requirement was you had to get a mac (to make it easier on IT I assume), the rest was up to you. Some people bought a $2000 macbook pro, some bought a $600 mac mini and used the rest on displays and other peripherals. Equality doesn't have to mean uniformity.

I saw this tried ones and it didn’t work. Some people would minimize the amount spent on their core hardware so they had money to spend on fun things. So you’d have to deal with someone whose 8GB RAM cheap computer couldn’t run the complicated integration tests but they were typing away on a $400 custom keyboard you didn’t even know existed while listening to their AirPods Max.

I mean; looks like someone volunteered to make the product work on low spec machines. That's needed.

I've been on teams where corporate hardware is all max spec, 4-5 years ahead of common user hardware, provided phones are all flagships replaced every two years. The product works great for corporate users, but not for users with earthly budgets. And they wonder how competitors swallow market in low income countries.

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#195

Post by the__alchemist »

unethical_ban wrote: post #193
brookst wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I enjoy building PCs so I've tried to justify upgrading my 5800x to a 9950x3d. But I really absolutely cannot justify it right now. I can play doom dark ages at 90fps 4k. I don't need it!

FYI, going from some Radeon I had from 6 years ago to a 9950x made a huge impact on game frame rate: choppy to smoother-than-i-can-percieve. And much faster compile times, and code execution if using thread pools. But, I think it was a 3 series Radeon, not 5. Totally worth it compared to say, GPU costs

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#196

Post by margalabargala »

AtlanticThird wrote: post #186
dcrazy wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it “soft fraud” when a manager at an investment bank regularly demands unreasonable productivity from their junior analysts, causing them to work late and effectively reduce their compensation rate? Only if the word “abuse” isn’t ambiguous and loaded enough for you!

Lying about a laptop being stolen is black and white. I'm not sure how you are trying to say that is ambiguous. I don't know what the hell you mean by the term unreasonable. Are you under the impression that investment banking analysts do not think they will have to work late before they take the role?

> Lying about a laptop being stolen is black and white. I'm not sure how you are trying to say that is ambiguous.

I've been at startups where there's sometimes late night food served.

I've never been at a startup where there was an epidemic about lying about stolen hardware.

Staying just late enough to order dinner on the company, and theft by the employee of computer hardware plus lying about it, are not in the same category and do not happen with equal frequency. I cannot believe the parent comment presented these as the same, and is being taken seriously.

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#197

Post by jcranmer »

sweetjuly wrote: post #95
mft_ wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

The thing that causes you run out of memory isn't actually anything in LLVM, it's all in ld. If you're building with debugging info, you end up pulling in all of the debug symbols for deduplication purposes during linking, and that easily takes up a few GB. Now link a dozen small programs in parallel (because make -j) and you've got an OOM issue. But the linker isn't part of LLVM itself (unless you're using lld), so there's not much that LLVM can do about it.

(If you're building with ninja, there's a cmake option to limit the parallelism of the link tasks to avoid this issue).

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#198

Post by the__alchemist »

Tangent: IMO top tier CPU is a no brainer if you play games, run performance-sensitive software (molecular dynamics or w/e), or compile code.

Look at GPU purchasing. It's full of price games, stock problems, scalpers, 3rd party boards with varying levels of factory overclock, and unreasonable prices. CPU is a comparative cake walk: go to Amazon or w/e, and buy the one with the highest numbers in its name.

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#199

Post by oblio »

screye wrote: post #170
avidiax wrote: post #10

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…

This is especially relevant now that docker has made it easy to maintain local builds of the entire app (fe+be). Factor in local AI flows and the RAM requirements explode. I have a whisper transcription module running at all times on my Mac. Often, I'll have a local telemetry service (langfuse) to monitor the 100s of LLM calls being made by all these models. With AI development it isnt uncommon to have multiple backg…

> On that point, Mac's unified VRAM is the right approach in 2025. I used windows/wsl devices for my entire life, but their time is up.

AMD's Strix Halo can have up to 128GB of unified RAM, I think. The bandwidth is less than half the Mac one, but it's probably going to accelerate.

Windows doesn't inherently care about this part of the hardware architecture.

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#200

Post by 1over137 »

delusional wrote: post #31
2shortplanks wrote: post #3

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 wish I was compiler bound. Nowadays, with everything being in the cloud or whatever I'm more likely to be waiting for Microsoft's MFA (forcing me to pick up my phone, the portal to distractions) or getting some time limited permission from PIM. The days when 30 seconds pauses for the compiler was the slowest part are long over.

You must be a web developer. Doing desktop development, nothing is in the cloud for me. I’m always waiting cor my compiler.
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