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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

#441

Post by znpy »

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…

When I worked at a FAANG, most developers could get remote virtual machine for their development needs. They could pick the machine type and size. It was one of the first thing you'd learn how to do in your emb^H^H^H onboarding :)

So it wasn't uncommon to see people with a measly old 13" macbook pro doing the hard work on a 64cpu/256GB remote machine. Laptops were essentially machines used for reading/writing emails, writing documents and doing meetings. The IDEs had a proprietary extensions to work with remote machines and the custom tooling.

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#442

Post by DrNosferatu »

zozbot234 wrote: post #123
bob1029 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Single core performance has not been stagnant. We're about double where we were in 2015 for a range of workloads. Branch prediction, OoO execution, SIMD, etc. make a huge difference. The clock speed of a core is important and we are hitting physical limits there, but we're also getting more done with each clock cycle than ever before.

Doubling single-core performance in 10 years amounts to a less than 10% improvement year-over-year. That will feel like "stagnant" if you're on non-vintage hardware. Of course there are improvements elsewhere that partially offset this, but there's no need to upgrade all that often.

It’s actually just 7% improvements year over year!

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#443

Post by znpy »

madog wrote: post #285
lukan wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"$1,000 chairs" Not an expert here, but from what I heard, that would be a bargain for a good office chair. And having a good chair or not - you literally feel the difference.

For sure. $1000 Herman Miller Aeron has been worth every penny considering the time spent sat on it.

I've been on those fancy chairs when I worked at a faang.

Honestly, they aren't any better than my ikea office chair I stole from my first house when I was a student (and that's been with me for the last 15 years). It has probably costed less than 100 €/$.

Ikea stuff is really underrated in this sense.

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#444

Post by bpye »

mwpmaybe wrote: post #440
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.

The combination of the twin Matisse I/O dies (one on the CPU package, one serving as the X570 chipset), Zen 3 chiplets, and overall maturity of the AM4 platform is still unmatched. I'm waiting for AM5 to "get good" before upgrading my 5950X (even though Zen 4 and Zen 5 chiplets are already quite good). I hope the next gen brings a core count bump, better DDR5 stability at higher speeds in 2DPC configurations, and USB…

Certainly agree on the chipset front - I went from an X570 to B650 which was absolutely a downgrade, the most painful being the loss of ACS on the chipset PCIe lanes.

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#445

Post by pjmlp »

krisroadruck wrote: post #116
jhanschoo wrote: post #26

Important caveat that the author neglects to mention since they are discussing laptop CPUs in the same breath: 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.

You simply cannot cram enough cooling and power into a laptop to have it equal a desktop high end desktop CPU of the same generation. There is physically not enough room. Just about the only way to even approach that would be to have liquid cooling loop ports out the back that you had to plug into an under-desk cooling loop and I don't think anyone is doing that because at that point just get a frickin desktop comput…

Carrying a desktop on the backpack is kind of hard for the work I do as a developer, not everyone is seating on a desk the full day, or has an assigned work desk at a specific office.

I work mostly remote, and also need to jump between office locations and customer sites as well.

Member of Windows/UNIX crowd since several decades.

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#446

Post by znpy »

dahart wrote: post #110
sgarland wrote: post #98

Tangential: TIL you can compile the Linux kernel in < 1 minute (on top-spec hardware). Seems it’s been a while since I’ve done that, because I remember it being more like an hour or more.

Spinning hard drives were soooo slow! Maybe very roughly an order of magnitude from SSDs and an order of magnitude from multi-core?

i think you nailed the centrail point.

rotational disks usually top up at ~85 MB/sec, with seek time being up to 12 msec for consumer drives and ~6 msec for enterprise drives (15k rpm).

ssd could saturate the sata bus and would top at 500-550 MB/sec, with essentially no seek time. latency wold be anything between 50 and 250 microseconds (depending on the operation).

nvme disks instead can sometimes full utilise a pci-e lane and reach multiple gigabytes/second in sequential read (ie: pci-e gen5 nvme disks can peak at 7 GB/sec) with latencies as low as 10–30 microseconds for reads and 20–100 microseconds for writes.

As compiling the kernel meant/means doing a lot of i/o on small files, you can see why disk access is a huge factor.

A friend of mine did work on LLVM for his PhD... The first thing he did when he got funding for his phd was getting a laptop with as much memory as possible (i think it was 64gb on a dell workstation, at the time) and mount his work directory in tmpfs.

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#447

Post by dontlaugh »

bpye wrote: post #402
saati wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 8 core X3D chips beat the 16 core ones on almost all games, so that's not that simple.

Can’t you pin a game to the 8 threads with the extra cache on the 16 core parts to get equivalent performance?

Both Windows and Linux handle asymmetric scheduling and the extra cache cores are considered performance cores.

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#448

Post by zozbot234 »

WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #364

There are peaks in long-term CPU value. That is, CPUs that are 1) performant enough to handle general purpose computing for a decade and 2) outperform later chips for a long time. The i7-4770 was one. It reliably outperformed later Intel CPUs until near 10th gen or so. I know shops that are still plugging away on them. The first comparable replacements for it is the i7-12700 (but the i5-12400 is a good buy). At 13th…

What's wrong with E cores? They're the best bang for the buck for both baseline low-power usage (and real-world systems are idle a lot of the time) and heavy multicore workloads. An E-core cluster takes a tiny fraction of area and power compared to a P-core, so it's not just a one-on-one comparison.

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#449

Post by dontlaugh »

gnfargbl wrote: post #49

OK, I'm convinced. Can someone tell me what to buy, specifically? Needs to run Ubuntu, support 2 x 4K monitors (3 would be nice), have at least 64GB RAM and fit on my desk. Don't particularly care how good the GPU is / is not. Here's my starting point: gmktec.com/products/amd-ryzen™-ai-max-395-evo-x2-ai-mini-pc. Anything better?

I just bought myself one of these for the same use case https://www.minisforum.uk/products/minisforum-bd770. I did also want to use my existing 3060 GPU, though. It all fit in a relatively small case.

You might be better off buying a mini pc if you’re happy with an integrated GPU. There are plenty of Ryzen mini pcs that end up cheaper than building around an itx motherboard.

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#450

Post by mwpmaybe »

bpye wrote: post #444
mwpmaybe wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The combination of the twin Matisse I/O dies (one on the CPU package, one serving as the X570 chipset), Zen 3 chiplets, and overall maturity of the AM4 platform is still unmatched. I'm waiting for AM5 to "get good" before upgrading my 5950X (even though Zen 4 and Zen 5 chiplets are already quite good). I hope the next gen brings a core count bump, better DDR5 stability at higher speeds in 2DPC configurations, and USB…

Certainly agree on the chipset front - I went from an X570 to B650 which was absolutely a downgrade, the most painful being the loss of ACS on the chipset PCIe lanes.

Terrible for VFIO!
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