Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

blog.howardjohn.info

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

491–500 of 522 posts

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#491

Post by mvdtnz »

vict7 wrote: post #482
mvdtnz wrote: 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…

You very clearly have no experience on powerful desktop machines. A 9950x will absolutely demolish an M3 or M4 Macbook Pro in any possible test, especially multicore testing. And I don't care how "performant" or "efficient" you think it is, those M series chips will be thermally throttled like anything else packaged into a laptop.

Oh, and the vastly superior dekstop rig will also come out cheaper, even with a quality monitor and keyboard.

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#492

Post by skirmish »

FergusArgyll wrote: post #264
brookst wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I find adding some typos and 1 or 2 bad grammer things lets you get away with whatever you want

> 1 or 2 bad grammer things

1 or 2 bed gamer things

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#493

Post by vict7 »

mvdtnz wrote: post #491
vict7 wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You very clearly have no experience on powerful desktop machines. A 9950x will absolutely demolish an M3 or M4 Macbook Pro in any possible test, especially multicore testing. And I don't care how "performant" or "efficient" you think it is, those M series chips will be thermally throttled like anything else packaged into a laptop. Oh, and the vastly superior dekstop rig will also come out cheaper, even with a quality…

That’s my bad for not clarifying I am talking solely about the laptop form factor here. It’s a given that laptops are not comparable in performance to desktops. In terms of laptop hardware, Apple Silicon performs quite well

Nice assumptions though.

It’s not just my opinion that Apple silicon is pretty performant and efficient for the form factor; you can look up the stats yourself if you cared to. Yet, it seems you may be one of those people that is hostile towards Apple for less well-founded reasons. It’s not a product for everyone, and that’s ok.

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#494

Post by vict7 »

epolanski wrote: post #490
vict7 wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have a decent rig I built (5900x, 7900xt) of course it blows my M1 MacBook out of the water.

You seem like a reasonable person that can admit there’s some nice things about Apple Silicon even though it doesn’t meet everyone’s needs.

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#495

Post by DrNosferatu »

ksec wrote: post #108
TiredOfLife wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Single core performance has tripled in the last 10 years

This. I just did a comparison between my MacBook Pro Early 2015 to MacBook Air M4 Early 2025. *Intel Core i5-5287U*: - *Single-Core Maximum Wattage*: ~7-12W - *Process Node*: 14nm - *GB6 Single Core *: ~950 - *Apple M4*: - *Single-Core Maximum Wattage*: ~4-6W - *Process Node*: 3nm - *GB6 Single Core *: ~3600 Intel 14nm = TSMC 10nm > 7nm > 5nm > 3nm In 10 years, we got ~3.5x Single Core performance at ~50% Wattage. i.…

That’s 13% per year.

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#496

Post by tradrich »

socalgal2 wrote: post #374
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.

...and this is a great setup.

On the laptop you need: - low weight so you can easily take it with you to work elsewhere - excellent screen/GPU - multiple large connected screens - plenty of memory - great keyboard/pointer device

Also: great chair

Frankly, what would be really great is a Mac Vision Pro fully customised as a workstation.

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#497

Post by jiggawatts »

hakfoo wrote: post #416
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…

In some cases, the bottlenecks are external. I've seen a test environment which has most assets local but a few shared services and databases accessed over a VPN which is evidently a VIC-20 connected over dialup. The dev environment can take 20 seconds to render a page that takes under 1 second on prod. Going to a newer machine with twice the RAM bought no meaningful improvement. They need a rearchitecture of their d…

> under 1 second on prod

There’s your problem. If your expectation was double-digit milliseconds in prod, then non-prod and its VPN also wouldn’t be an issue.

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#498

Post by margalabargala »

kelnos wrote: post #361
margalabargala wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're not discussing lying about working late, we're discussing actually working late.

The person way upthread said: > people started staying just late enough for the food delivery to arrive while scrolling on their phones and then walking out the door with their meal. That doesn't sound like actually working late? (I still agree with you, though, that this isn't the equivalent of stealing a laptop, even if you do it enough to take home $2,000 worth of dinner.)

That's true, but the point I made to that was more along the lines of "physically being present in the office, it's likely an employee will still provide enough benefit to make the money worth it". They don't have to be coding. Chatting with a coworker about something non-work-related can be enough of a bonding experience for that to.be worth the company the dinner money in intangible productivity benefits down the line.

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#500

Post by k4rli »

JS ~~devs~~ writers keep managing to make their bloatware run slow even on highend hardware.

Ryzen 9 7900x + 128GB ram + 6900XT + arch yet Cursor IDE still manages to be incredibly slow and freezing up after re-focusing. Even base VSCodium is many times faster than that. I can have AAA game + kernel build + 100 Firefox tabs active at the same time, yet a piece of JS makes the hardware seem garbage.

Post reply on HN