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It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

blog.howardjohn.info

481–490 of 522 posts

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#481
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does this mean that compilation fails without an internet connection? If so, that's horrifying.

Yes, of course it does, isn't it nice? Even better if you want to automate the whole notarization thing you don't have a "nice" notarize-this-thing command that blocks until its notarized and fails if there's an issue, you send a notarization request... and wait, and then you can write a nice for/sleep/check loop in a shell script to figure out whether the notarization finished and whether it did so successfully. Of…

None of this comment is true.

Compilation works fine without notarization. It isn't called by default for the vast majority of complications. It is only called if you submit to an App Store, or manually trigger notarization.

The notarization command definitely does have the wait feature you claim it doesn't: `xcrun notarytool ... --wait`.

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#482
post #385
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…

> it rarely if ever makes sense to buy anything but the top spec Macbook Pro available God I wish my employers would stop buying me Macbook Pros and let me work on a proper Linux desktop. I'm sick of shitty thermally throttled slow-ass phone chips on serious work machines.

Curious perspective. Apple silicon is both performant and very power efficient. Of course there are applications where even a top spec MacBook would be unsuitable, but I imagine that would be a very small percentage of folks needing that kind of power.

Sadly, the choice is usually between Mac and Windows—not a Linux desktop. In that case, I’d much prefer a unix-like operating system like MacOS.

To be clear, I am not a “fanboy” and Apple continues to make plenty of missteps. Not all criticisms against Apple are well founded though.

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bought a geforce RTX 3080 at launch and boy was I surprised at the power draw and heat/noise it pumps out. I wonder why anybody bothers with the 90 series at all. I actually run it ~10% underclocked, barely affects performance, but greatly reduces heat/noise. These cards are configured to deliver maximum performance at any cost (besides system instability). My next GPU I am probably going mid-range to be honest, th…

> I bought a geforce RTX 3080 at launch and boy was I surprised at the power draw and heat/noise it pumps out. I wonder why anybody bothers with the 90 series at all. More VRAM, and NVLink (on some models). You can easily run them at lower power limits. I've run CUDA workloads with my dual 3090s set as low as 170W to hit that sweet spot on the efficiency curve. You can actually go all the way down to 100W!

Oh well, for GPU programming sure as VRAM is king depending on task. But for gaming I won't go high end again.

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#485
post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Raspberry 5 is a dud, either go 4 or 3588 CM: http://move.rupy.se/file/radxa_works.mp4 Or in a uConsole. Also Risc-V tablet: http://move.rupy.se/file/pinetab-v_2dmmo.png Not as battle hardened as my Thinkpad X61s but maybe we'll get a GPU driver soon... 3 years later...

> Raspberry 5 is a dud cf. the Pi 4: 2–3X CPU performance, full 5Gbps USB 3.0 ports, a PCIe Gen2 x1 connector, dual 4-lane MIPI connectors, support for A2-class SD cards, an integrated RTC... A dud?? What's the issue? The price?

I do not know the specifics but a large issue with the 5 is that a lot of hardware acceleration for encoding and decoding video was removed, making it slower for anything to do with video.

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Raspberry 5 is a dud cf. the Pi 4: 2–3X CPU performance, full 5Gbps USB 3.0 ports, a PCIe Gen2 x1 connector, dual 4-lane MIPI connectors, support for A2-class SD cards, an integrated RTC... A dud?? What's the issue? The price?

I do not know the specifics but a large issue with the 5 is that a lot of hardware acceleration for encoding and decoding video was removed, making it slower for anything to do with video.

Ah, yes, it's definitely a poor choice for most video-encoding and some video-decoding use-cases. Just not sure how GP goes from that to "dud"...

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#487
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…

I always bought a really large monitor for work with my own cash. When most dev's had 19" or 20" I got a 30" for $1500.

best money ever spent. lasted years and years.

for cpus - I wonder how the economics work out when you get into say 32 or 64 core threadrippers? I think it still might be worth it.

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#488

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…

A lot of people miss the multi-core advantage. A lot of times the number of cores is an almost linear decrease in compile time.

You do need a good SSD though. There is a new generation of pcie5 SSDs that came out that seems like it might be quite a bit faster.

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#489
post #441
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,…

more than that, in the faang jobs I've had you could not even check code out onto your laptop. it had to live on the dev desktop or virtual machine, and be edited remotely.

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#490
post #482
post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it rarely if ever makes sense to buy anything but the top spec Macbook Pro available God I wish my employers would stop buying me Macbook Pros and let me work on a proper Linux desktop. I'm sick of shitty thermally throttled slow-ass phone chips on serious work machines.

Curious perspective. Apple silicon is both performant and very power efficient. Of course there are applications where even a top spec MacBook would be unsuitable, but I imagine that would be a very small percentage of folks needing that kind of power. Sadly, the choice is usually between Mac and Windows—not a Linux desktop. In that case, I’d much prefer a unix-like operating system like MacOS. To be clear, I am not…

I have a 7950x desktop and an M3 max, they are very distant in performance for development, albeit I'll give credit to Apple for good single core performance that show in some contexts.
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