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

New Mac Pro Tech Specs

apple.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 497 posts

Re: New Mac Pro Tech Specs

#301

Post by 8draco8 »

nvarsj wrote: post #288
lliamander wrote: post #49

Slightly off-topic, but who here uses a HEDT (high-end desktop) or workstation computer for software development? Does it make a significant difference in comparison with a standard business laptop?

Oh yes, it makes a _huge_ difference. Most modern laptops use constrained, low power CPUs and GPUs. They are dog slow. Even my 5 year old desktop is substantially faster (like, builds take half the time kind of difference) compared to my Possibly the only laptops that could compare to desktops are gaming laptops, and I know developers who buy things like the Razer gaming laptop to try and get desktop-like performance…

For me the problem with gaming laptops for work is their GPUs. I honestly don't need anything beyond build in Intel GPUs but I would love to have powerful CPU + a lot of RAM. Highend GPUs are driving prices of laptops very high so essentially I'm paying a lot for hardware that I would never use. That's why I prefer desktops, there is no problem with having Threadripper and 128GB of RAM in case with some basic $30 used GPU.

Re: New Mac Pro Tech Specs

#302

Post by chrisseaton »

m0zg wrote: post #300
chrisseaton wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you have the GPUs inside the office with the people rather than in a server room under temperature control?

There's _also_ a sizable server room with temperature control (which was also woefully underpowered when we moved into the office). It's just more convenient for researchers to have a couple of GPUs locally.

You can remote GPUs pretty far these days - it’s possible to have a local system and have the cards still connected with PCI but on the other side of a wall.

Re: New Mac Pro Tech Specs

#303

Post by throwaway1777 »

thelittleone wrote: post #250
bayindirh wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My friend living in NZ has a fantastic quote about the distance: > NZ is a fantastic place. It takes 24 hours to get anywhere around the world. Yep, it's that far.

It’s far but 24hrs is a bit stretching reality e.g. ~12hrs to Santiago Chile. ~9hrs to Bali, Indonesia. ~13hrs to Los Angeles, USA. ~4hrs to Sydney, Australia.

Add a layover and you could easily be at 20+ hours (which is common since NZ is small so there aren’t that many flights). Europe is well over 24 hours even to the major hubs.

Re: New Mac Pro Tech Specs

#304

Post by PhantomGremlin »

29_29 wrote: post #94
jaequery wrote: post #35

The biggest new feature im looking for is the removal of the touchbar. Until then, I’m going to just buy upgraded but used 2012-2013 macbook pros. It’s one of those sounds good on paper but useless in real life. Not only that, it’s a hindrance for coders like me who need to be able to hit the escape button and other top buttons quickly with force feedback.

I'm not sure why people are downvoting you. I hate this feature on HN. I cant even read what you said.

If you're logged in, all you need to do is click on the "9 hours ago" field of the comment. That takes you to the individual comment, fully visible. So it's only one extra click to read.

This unfortunately doesn't work if you're not logged in.

Re: New Mac Pro Tech Specs

#305

Post by jakobegger »

felipelemos wrote: post #294
aseipp wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. I work on a Linux distro, and the amount of time my 1st gen 32 core Threadripper has saved me is truly mind blowing. It made it possible to do changes I wouldn't have dreamed of. As an example, I worked a bunch on our PostgreSQL infrastructure, but we support 5 years of versions. So you have to CI/integrate your changes and test them across all 5 versions, every time you test. My machine could do this on the ord…

Why not a dedicated CI server with all this power and a more modest and cheap workstation?

Because then you need to commit your chnges, push to a remote Git repo, wait for the CI server to check for changes, wait for the CI server to finish previously scheduled builds, wait for CI server to start building, ...

Also, all that needs to be set up. If you need to change some little thing, you're much faster doing it locally, rather than trying to wrap your head around the build server configuration and figure out how to just run this one test different but only for this branch and not for the normal builds ...

Re: New Mac Pro Tech Specs

#306

Post by movedx »

hyperactive wrote: post #291
movedx wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not targeting you.

No it's not. I like MacOS and use their laptops, but Apple proprietary approach does not work for me when it comes to desktop. Their development lifecycle must be very long if they missed advancements in the CPU space. Ryzen to the masses.

But it does work for many others and/or certain industries, and that's fine.

Re: New Mac Pro Tech Specs

#307

Post by arvinsim »

valbaca wrote: post #70
lliamander wrote: post #49

Slightly off-topic, but who here uses a HEDT (high-end desktop) or workstation computer for software development? Does it make a significant difference in comparison with a standard business laptop?

My company provides a pretty standard laptop, but they rarely have more than 2 cores. In native app development, Android Studio and Xcode are severely bottlenecked by 2 cores. The difference between my laptop and my Mac Mini (6 cores) is astounding. The difference between a build taking 6x minutes and 1x minutes is more than just 1/6 because it goes from "Well, guess I'll check email/messenger/HN real quick." to taki…

When I started working in my current company, the dual core, 16GB MBP that was given to me was enough since I was working on a single project.

But now that I am working across projects that run 2-3 repositories at a time with Jetbrains IDE, the computer almost barely keep up. I get times where typing will actually lag.

I am contemplating asking them for a Mac Mini instead since I rarely ever venture out from my desk.

Re: New Mac Pro Tech Specs

#308

Post by michaelt »

benburleson wrote: post #51
CDSlice wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes? I love my wireless keyboard and mouse, although they run off of AA batteries so I don't need to recharge them.

In this case, is the freedom of wireless worth the hassle+cost of batteries?

Personally I used to use a Logitech wireless keyboard and mouse and stopped doing so.

The reason was my mouse cursor intermittently freezing - and there being no easy way to tell the difference between lag due to high workload, the signal being blocked by obstacles (like the computer's own case), intermittent radio interference, other USB devices spamming noise onto the 5v USB supply, and flat batteries.

It's possible Apple has solved all these problems - none of them seem intractable.

Re: New Mac Pro Tech Specs

#309

Post by Shaddox »

ghego1 wrote: post #245
jaynetics wrote: post #221

"Maximum altitude: tested up to 16,400 feet (5000 meters)" Does anyone know how or where they do this testing? Seems quite bothersome to do.

This made me wonder, why is max altitude a limit? Is it due to cooling (less air)? I'd be glad to know more if anyone has some insights

I'm not a specialist, I just read up about it some time ago so take what I say with a grain of salt.

Basically there's two issues affecting electronic chipsets at high altitude : air density and cosmic rays.

The reduction of the air density can mess with the cooling system.

Cosmic rays contain radioactive particles which can cause soft failures to occur in solid state electronics.

EDIT : Found an interesting paper about it with more details : https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/6046/529f05a65e182ac9323ef8...

Post reply on HN