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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

#371

Post by dbg31415 »

It's worth paying for reliability. If that also means more speed, fine -- but raw CPU benchmarks rarely matter outside of very specific workloads. What you'll notice day to day is whether the machine crashes, wipes out a project, or forces you into an unexpected week of downtime.

Computers are like lightbulbs, and laptops are the extra fragile kind. They burn out. I've never had one more than five years, and after year three I just assume it could fail at any moment -- whether it's an SSD crash, a swollen battery, or drivers breaking after the next OS update.

If you replace machines every three years, like I do, you're not necessarily paying for performance -- you're really just paying for peace of mind.

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#372

Post by msk-lywenn »

rafaelmn wrote: post #260
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think people overestimate the value of a little bump in performance. I recently built a gaming PC with a 9700X. The 9800X3D is drastically more popular, for an 18% performance bump on benchmarks but double the power draw. I rarely peg my CPU, but I am always drawing power. Higher power draw means it runs hotter, and it stresses the power supply and cooling systems more. I'd rather go a little more modest for a syst…

Is it really 2x or is it 2x at max load ? Since, as you say, you're not peggig the CPU - would be interesting to compare power usage on a task basis and the duration. Could be that the 3D cache is really adding that much overhead even to idle CPU. Anyway I've never regretted buying a faster CPU (GPU is a different story, burned some money there on short time window gains that were marginally relevant), but I did regr…

I recently had some fun overclocking my old i5 4690.

IIRC, running the base frequency at 3.9Ghz instead of 3.5GHz, yield a very modest performance boost but added 20% more power consumption and temperature.

I then underclocked it to 3.1Ghz and the thing barely ran at more than 40°C under load and power consumption was super low! The performance was more than mediocre though...

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#373

Post by cout »

mordae wrote: post #13
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…

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.

I've seen gcc+ld use a large amount of disk (dozens of GB) during LTO.

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#374

Post by socalgal2 »

joshka wrote: post #315

At my former job at a FAANG, I did the math on allocating developers machines with 16GB vs 64GB based on actual job tasks with estimates of how much thumb twiddling waiting time that this would save and then multiplied that out by the cost of the developer's time. The cost benefit showed a reasonable ROI that was realized in Weeks for Senior dev salaries (months for juniors). Based on this, I strongly believe that if…

Most of my friends at FAANG all do their work on servers remotely. Remote edit, remote build. The builds happen in giant networked cloud builders, 100s to 1000s per build. Giving them a faster local machine would do almost nothing because they don't do anything local.

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#375

Post by FpUser »

svantana wrote: post #319
joshka wrote: post #315

At my former job at a FAANG, I did the math on allocating developers machines with 16GB vs 64GB based on actual job tasks with estimates of how much thumb twiddling waiting time that this would save and then multiplied that out by the cost of the developer's time. The cost benefit showed a reasonable ROI that was realized in Weeks for Senior dev salaries (months for juniors). Based on this, I strongly believe that if…

No doubt the math checks out, but I wonder if developer productivity can be quantified that easily. I believe there's a lot of research pointing to people having a somewhat fixed amount of cognitive capacity available per day, and that aligns well with my personal experience. A lot of times, waiting for the computer to finish feels like a micro-break that saves up energy for my next deep thought process.

>"A lot of times, waiting for the computer to finish feels like a micro-break that saves up energy for my next deep thought process."

As an ISV I buy my own hardware so I do care about expenses. I can attest that to me waiting for computer to finish feels like a big irritant that can spoil my programming flow. I take my breaks whenever I feel like and do not need a computer to help me. So I pay for top notch desktops (within reason of course).

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#376

Post by vardump »

Paianni wrote: post #368
SlowTao wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really depends on your use case. I personally still run my 17 year old 2.4GHz Core 2 duo with 4GB of RAM as my daily runner. I simply do not hit the walls even on that thing. Most folks here simply would not accept that and not because they are spoilt but their works loads demand more.

Nothing older than Nehalem and Bulldozer got microcode mitigations for Spectre, so I'd say running a C2D online would be a liability by now.

…IF anyone really bothered to develop exploits against something practically no one uses anymore at this point.

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#377

Post by anthk »

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.

No ccache?

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#378

Post by mpyne »

Aurornis wrote: post #117
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…

Every well funded startup I’ve worked for went through a period where employees could get nearly anything they asked for: New computers, more monitors, special chairs, standing desks, SaaS software, DoorDash when working late. If engineers said they needed it, they got it. Then some period of time later they start looking at spending in detail and can’t believe how much is being spent by the 25% or so who abuse the p…

> It’s hard to believe if you’re a person who moderates their own expenditures.

Yeah, it's hard to convey to people who've never been responsible for setting (or proposing) policy that it's not a game of optimizing the average result, but of minimizing the worst-case result.

You and I and most people are not out to arbitrage the company's resources but you and I and most people are also not the reason policy exists.

It was depressing to run into that reality myself as policy controls really do interfere sometimes in allowing people to access benefits the organization wants them to have, but the alternative is that the entire budget for perks ends up in the hands of a very few people until the benefit goes away completely.

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#379

Post by anthk »

AnotherGoodName wrote: post #226
enraged_camel wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> For games its generally not worthwhile since the performance is almost entirely based on gpu these days. It completely depends on the game. Civilization series, for example, are mostly CPU bound, which is why turns take longer and longer as the games progress.

Factorio and stellaris are others i’m aware of. Factorio it's an issue when you go way past the end game into the 1000+ hour megabases. Stellaris is just poorly coded with lots of n^2 algorithms and can run slowly on anything once population and fleets grow a bit. For civilisation the ai does take turns faster with a higher end cpu but imho it’s also no big deal since you spend most time scrolling the map and taking…

If Civ/Stellaris devs can't handle something as basic iteration vs recursion, then they are damn lost.

Also, a language with a GC (not Java) would shine there, it's ideal for a turn based game.

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