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Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading

incident.io

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Re: Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading

#21

Post by lawrjone »

closeparen wrote: post #13
LanzVonL wrote: post #3

We've found that distributed building has pretty much eliminated the need to upgrading developer workstations. Super easy to set up, too.

A Macbook-equivalent AWS instance prices to at least the cost of a Macbook per year.

Yes I actually did the maths on this.

If you want a GCP instance that is comparable to an M3 Pro 36GB, you're looking at an n2-standard-8 with a 1TB SSD, which comes out at $400/month.

Assuming you have it running just 8 hours a day (if your developers clock in at exact times) and you can 1/3 that to make it $133/month, or $1600/year.

We expect these MacBooks to have at least a 2 year life, which means you're comparing the cost of the MacBook to 2 years of running the VM for 8 hours a day, which means $2800 vs $3200, so the MacBook still comes in $400 cheaper over it's lifetime.

And the kicker is you still need to buy people laptops so they can connect to the build machine, and you can no longer work if you have bad internet connection. So for us the trade-off doesn't work whichever way you cut it.

Re: Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading

#23

Post by mgaunard »

closeparen wrote: post #13
LanzVonL wrote: post #3

We've found that distributed building has pretty much eliminated the need to upgrading developer workstations. Super easy to set up, too.

A Macbook-equivalent AWS instance prices to at least the cost of a Macbook per year.

Anything cloud is 3 to 10 times the price of just buying equivalent hardware.

Re: Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading

#25

Post by throwaway892238 »

lawrjone wrote: post #21
closeparen wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A Macbook-equivalent AWS instance prices to at least the cost of a Macbook per year.

Yes I actually did the maths on this. If you want a GCP instance that is comparable to an M3 Pro 36GB, you're looking at an n2-standard-8 with a 1TB SSD, which comes out at $400/month. Assuming you have it running just 8 hours a day (if your developers clock in at exact times) and you can 1/3 that to make it $133/month, or $1600/year. We expect these MacBooks to have at least a 2 year life, which means you're compari…

  1. With a savings plan or on-demand?
  2. Keeping one instance on per developer indefinitely, or only when needed?
  3. Shared nodes? Node pools?
  4. Compared to what other instance types/sizes?
  5. Spot pricing?
Shared nodes brought up on-demand with a savings plan and spot pricing is the same cost if not cheaper than dedicated high-end laptops. And on top of that, they can actually scale their resources much higher than a laptop can, and do distributed compute/test/etc, and match production. And with a remote dev environment, you can easily fix issues with onboarding where different people end up with different setups, miss steps, need their tooling re-installed or to match versions, etc.

Re: Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading

#26

Post by lawrjone »

vessenes wrote: post #18
lawrjone wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is pretty much aligned with our findings (am the author of this post). I came away feeling that: - M1 is a solid baseline - M2 improves performance by about 60% - M3 Pro is marginal on the M2, more like 10% - M3 Max (for our use case) didn’t seem that much different on the M3 Pro, though we had less data on this than other models I suspect Apple saw the M3 Pro as “maintain performance and improve efficiency” whi…

Yeah, agreed. I'll say I do use the M3 Max for Baldur's gate :). On LLMs, the issue is largely that memory bandwidth: M2 Ultra is 800GB/s, M3 Max is 400GB/s. Inference on larger models are simple math on what's in memory, so the performance is roughly double. Probably perf / watt suffers a little, but when you're trying to chew through 128GB of RAM and do math on all of it, you're generally maxing your thermal budget…

Ahh right, I'd seen a few comments about the memory bandwidth when it was posted on LinkedIn, specifically that the M2 was much more powerful.

This makes a load of sense, thanks for explaining.

Re: Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading

#27

Post by fragmede »

kingTug wrote: post #10

Does anyone have any anecdoctal evidence around the snappiness of VsCode with Apple Silicon? I very begrudgingly switched over from SublimeText this year (after using it as my daily driver for ~10yrs). I have a beefy 2018 MBP but VScode just drags. This is the only thing pushing me to upgrade my machine right now but I'd be bummed if there's still not a significant improvement with an m3 pro.

Your 5 year old computer is, well, 5 years old. It was once beefy but that's technology for you.

Re: Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading

#29

Post by LispSporks22 »

I wish I needed a fast computer. It’s the CI/CD that’s killing me. All this cloud stuff we use - can’t test anything locally anymore. Can’t use the debugger. I’m back to glorified fmt.Printf statements that hopefully have enough context that the 40 min build/deploy time was worth it. At least it’s differential ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ All I can say is “I compiles… I think?” The unit tests are mostly worthless and the setup for sending something to a lambda feels like JCL boiler plate masturbation from that z/OS course I took out of curiosity last year. I only typing this out because I just restarted CI/CD to redeploy what I already pushed because even that’s janky. Huh, it’s an M3 they gave me.

Re: Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading

#30

Post by mgaunard »

t-writescode wrote: post #24
mgaunard wrote: post #19

[flagged]

I can’t use a desktop on a ferry or plane or at my Aunt’s over Thanksgiving

Your working equipment shouldn't be optimized around the possibility of you logging in for five minutes while on holiday.
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