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

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

#331

Post by [deleted] »

tracker1 wrote: post #286
LASR wrote: post #90

Solid analysis. A word of warning from personal experience: I am part of a medium-sized software company (2k employees). A few years ago, we wanted to improve dev productivity. Instead of going with new laptops, we decided to explore offloading the dev stack over to AWS boxes. This turned out to be a multi-year project with a whole team of devs (~4) working on it full-time. In hindsight, the tradeoff wasn't worth it.…

Second on this. Not being able to run a solution entirely local introduces massive friction in terms of being able to reason with said solution. When you need to have 200+ parts running to do anything, it can be hard to work in a single piece that touches a couple others. With servers that have upwards of 128+ cores and 256+ threads, my opinion is swinging back in favor of monoliths for most software.

[deleted]

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

#332

Post by fallous »

dash2 wrote: post #78

As a scientist, I'm interested how computer programmers work with data. * They drew beautiful graphs! * They used chatgpt to automate their analysis super-fast! * ChatGPT punched out a reasonably sensible t test! But: * They had variation across memory and chip type, but they never thought of using a linear regression. * They drew histograms, which are hard to compare. They could have supplemented them with simple me…

I think you might want to add the caveat "young computer programmers." Some of us grew up in a time where we had to learn basic statistics and visualization to understand profiling at the "bare metal" level and carried that on throughout our careers.

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

#333

Post by Joeri »

mgrandl wrote: post #63
tomaskafka wrote: post #47

My personal research for iOS development, taking the cost into consideration, concluded: - M2 Pro is nice, but the improvement over 10 core (8 perf cores) M1 Pro is not that large (136 vs 120 s in Xcode benchmark: https://github.com/devMEremenko/XcodeBenchmark ) - M3 Pro is nerfed (only 6 perf cores) to better distinguish and sell M3 Max, basically on par with M2 Pro So, in the end, I got a slightly used 10 core M1 P…

The M3 Pro being nerfed has been parroted on the Internet since the announcement. Practically it’s a great choice. It’s much more efficient than the M2 Pro at slightly better performance. That’s what I am looking for in a laptop. I don’t really have a usecase for the memory bandwidth…

AI is the main use case for memory bandwidth that I know of. Local LLM’s are memory bandwidth limited when running inference, so once you fall into that trap you end up wanting the 400 gb/s max memory bandwidth of the m1/m2/m3 max, paired with lots and lots of RAM. Apple pairs memory size and bandwidth upgrades to core counts a lot more in m3 which makes the m3 line-up far more expensive than the m2 line-up to reach comparable LLM performance. Them touting AI as a use case for the m3 line-up in the keynote was decidedly odd, as this generation is a step back when it comes to price vs performance.

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

#334

Post by lagadu »

hmottestad wrote: post #166
tmpfile wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you find your compiles are slow, I found a bug in vscode where builds would compile significantly faster when the status bar and panel are hidden. Compiles that took 20s would take 4s with those panels hidden. https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/160118

That was a year ago! At this point someone will complain that it’s a feature they use to warm their cat. Not every day one sees a user report a 5x performance issue that seems so simple to reproduce.

Obligatory relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1172/

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

#336

Post by jes »

eutropia wrote: post #226

To play devil’s advocate: did you see any improvement in ticket velocity, features shipped, bugs dispatched, prod events resolved - i.e. is this improvement in productivity measurable by what you judge the business by, or does it just feel better and make devs happy?

Eli Goldratt has entered the chat...

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

#337

Post by ametrau »

randomgiy3142 wrote: post #284
dmos62 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My dev box died (that I used for remote work), and instead of buying something new immediately, I moved my setup to a Hetzner cloud vps. Took around 2 days. Stuff like setting up termux on my tablet and the cli environment on the vps was 90 percent of that. The plus side was that I then spent the remaining summer working outside in the terrace and in the park. Was awesome. I was able to do it because practically all…

I’d be careful with Hetzner. I was doing nothing malicious and signed up. I had to submit a passport which was valid US. It got my account cancelled. I asked why and they said they couldn’t say for security reasons. They seem like an awesome service, I don’t want knock them I just simply asked if I could resubmit or something the mediate and they said no. I don’t blame them just be careful. I’m guessing my passport a…

You have to give a hosting company a copy of your passport?!? (And hope they delete it… eventually?)

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

#338

Post by lagadu »

eutropia wrote: post #226

To play devil’s advocate: did you see any improvement in ticket velocity, features shipped, bugs dispatched, prod events resolved - i.e. is this improvement in productivity measurable by what you judge the business by, or does it just feel better and make devs happy?

Happy devs will at the very least reduce turnover rate, which will have a net positive effect in all the metrics you mentioned.

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

#339

Post by brandall10 »

Ar-Curunir wrote: post #227
orangecat wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The M3 Pro and Max get virtually identical results in battery tests, e.g. https://www.tomsguide.com/news/macbook-pro-m3-and-m3-max-bat... . The Pro may be a perfectly fine machine, but Apple didn't remove cores to increase battery life; they did it to lower costs and upsell the Max.

It might be the case that the yield on the chips is low, so they decided to use “defective” chips in the M3 Pro, and the non-defective in the M3 Max.

These aren't binned chips... the use of efficiency cores does reduce transistor count considerably which could improve yields.

That said, while the transistor count of the M2 Pro -> M3 Pro did decrease, it went up quite a bit from the M2 -> M3.

It seems most likely Apple is just looking to differentiate the tiers.

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

#340

Post by endless1234 »

serf wrote: post #102
endless1234 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps many people building code do not need multiple 16x PCI-Express cards in their day to day workflow, but like being able to move around with their laptop?

Yeah , perhaps -- but >Apple Silicon devices can get the same performance as a desktop in a laptop size. is still unequivocally wrong, bordering on belligerent marketing misinformation.

For lots of workloads it is basically true, though. Not something exclusive to Apple laptops of course, others have also been capable programming workhorses for quite some years. It's just weird to say that no compiling should be done on a laptop - that might've been true 10 years ago.
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