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Hold on to Your Hardware

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Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#381

Post by tristor »

sgarland wrote: post #353
tristor wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> spending $10k on a MacBook Pro with 128GB. As someone who just bought a completely maxed out 14" Macbook Pro with an M5 Max and 128GB of RAM and 8TB SSD, it was not $10k, it was only a bit over $7k. Where is this extra $3k going?

Tangential, I bought a nearly identically-spec'd (didn't spring for the 8 TB SSD - in retrospect, had I kept it, I would've been OK with the 4 TB) model, and returned it yesterday due to thermal throttling. I have an M4 Pro w/ 48 GB RAM, and since the M5 Max was touted as being quite a bit faster for various local LLM usages, I decided I'd try it. Turns out the heatsink in the 14" isn't nearly enough to handle the Ma…

I haven't really had a problem with thermal throttling, but my highest compute activity is inferencing. The main performance fall-off I've observed is that the cache/context size to token output rate curve is way more aggressive than I expected given the memory bandwidth compared to GPU-based inferencing I've done on PC. But other than spinning up the fans during prompt processing, I'm able to stay peak CPU usage without clock speed reducing. Generally though this only maintains peak compute utilization for around 2-3 minutes.

I'm wondering if there was something wrong with your particular unit?

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#382

Post by tcmart14 »

ryandrake wrote: post #309
foobarian wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep wondering why we can't have 2000s software on today's hardware. Maybe because browsers are de facto required to build apps?

We could, but most of the 2000s developers are gone. Or, we no longer have developers left with 2000s attitudes and approaches to software development.

I think that is a little bit unfair. I think plenty of developers, myself included wouldn't mind or would like to do native applications. Every time someone does those, a mountain of people ask "why" and "this shoulda/coulda been a web app." And some of that is somewhat reasonable. It's easier to achieve decent-ish cross platform. But also tons of consumers also just don't wanna download and install applications unless it comes from an App Store. And even then, it's iffy. Or most often the case, it's a requirement of the founders/upper management/c-suite. And lets be honest, when tons of jobs ask for reactive experience or vue.js, what motivates developers to learn GTK or Qt or Winforms or WinUI3?

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#383

Post by balamatom »

cesarb wrote: post #182
jusssi wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can control of compute be far behind? How is this going to work? You need uncontrolled compute for developing software. Any country locking up that ability too much will lose to those who don't.

> How is this going to work? You need uncontrolled compute for developing software. I've read about companies where all software developers have to RDP to the company's servers to develop software, either to save on costs (sharing a few powerful servers with plenty of RAM and CPU between several developers) or to protect against leaks (since the code and assets never leave the company's Citrix servers).

Even for tiny crews doing nothing of fatal significance, this is unironically superior to "throw it on GitHub"

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#384

Post by GeoAtreides »

random3 wrote: post #331
raincole wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We won't be in a supply crunch forever. We'll have a demand crunch. The demand of powerful consumer hardware will shrink so much that producing them will lose the economics of scale. It 've always been bound to happen, just delayed by the trend of pursuing realistic graphics for games. People who are willing to drop $20k on a computer might not be affected much tho.

Apple just launched a $600 amazing laptop and the top models have massive performance. What are we talking about here?

but I don't want a $600 amazing laptop, i want a powerful desktop x86 machine with loads of ram and disk space. As cheap as it was a couple of years ago.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#385

Post by c0decracker »

xyst wrote: post #198

Not a single comment mentioning how programmers these days don’t give a shit about optimization.

They do, at least a lot of us do I would say. But not everyone is at liberty to dedicate (still very expensive) time of a software engineer to eek out better memory footprint when it is cheaper to "just throw hardware at it" in many cases.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#386

Post by interf4ce »

sfn42 wrote: post #270
interf4ce wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue isn't usage, it's waste. Every byte of RAM that's used unnecessarily because of bloated software frameworks used by lazy devs (devs who make the same arguments you're making) is a byte that can't be used by the software that actually needs it, like video editing, data processing, 3D work, CAD, etc. It's incredibly short sighted to think that any consumer application runs in a vacuum with all system resource…

I dunno man, I have 32gb and I'm totally fine playing games with 50 browser tabs open along with discord and Spotify and a bunch of other crap. In not trying to excuse crappy developers making crappy slow ad wasteful apps, I just don't think electron itself is the problem. Nor do I think it's a particularly big deal if an app uses some memory.

You're right, Electron is not inherently bad and apps need RAM. There's no getting around that.

The issue with Electron is that it encourages building desktop apps as self-contained websites. Sure, that makes it easier to distribute apps across systems and OSes, but it also means you've got front end web devs building system applications. Naturally, they'll use what they're used to: usually React, which exacerbates the problem. Plus it means that each app is running a new instance of a web browser, which adds overhead.

In real life, yeah, it's rare that I actually encounter a system slowdown because yet another app is running on Electron. I just think that it's bad practice to assume that all users can spare the memory.

I'll admit that my concern is more of a moral one than a practical one. I build software for a living and I think that optimizing resource usage is one way to show respect to my users (be they consumers, ops people running the infra, or whatever). Not to mention that lean, snappy apps make for a better user experience.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#387

Post by barrkel »

Aurornis wrote: post #311
chmod775 wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're fast, but they'll never even remotely reach what a mid-range desktop PC with dedicated graphics burning 500W is able to do. A 300W GPU released in 2025 is about 10x M5 perf. The difference is going to be smaller for CPU perf, but also not close.

> The difference is going to be smaller for CPU perf, but also not close. This is not true. The recent MacBook Pros are every bit as fast as my Zen 5 desktop for most tasks like compiling. For GPU there is a difference because both are constrained by thermal and power requirements where the desktop has a big advantage. For CPU compute, the laptop can actually be faster for single threaded work and comparable for mult…

For batch jobs there isn't much competition. 9995wx has 3 to 4x throughput of M5 max.

And then, if your laptop is busy, your machine is occupied - I hate that feeling. I never run heavy software on my laptop. My machine is in the cellar, I connect over ssh. My desktop and my laptop are different machines. I don't want to have to keep my laptop open and running. And I don't want to drag an expensive piece of hardware everywhere.

And then you need to use macOS. I'm not a macOS person.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#388

Post by Tossrock »

WillAdams wrote: post #152
torben-friis wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, other than AI stuff, where does a non powerful computer limit you? My phone has 16gigs of ram and a terabyte of storage, laptops today are ridiculous compared to anything I studied with. I'm not arguing mind you, just trying to understand the usecases people are thinking of here.

3D CAD/CAM is still CPU (and to a lesser extent memory) bound --- I do joinery, and my last attempt at a test joint for a project I'm still working up to was a 1" x 2" x 1" area (two 1" x 1" x 1" halves which mated) which took an entry-level CAM program some 18--20 minutes to calculate and made a ~140MB file including G-code toolpaths.... (really should have tracked memory usage....)

That sounds like pretty degenerate behavior. I typically have CAM toolpaths generate in seconds using Fusion or PrusaSlicer.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#390

Post by hollerith »

sfn42 wrote: post #170
vladvasiliu wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only. At work I've got a new computer, replacing a lower-end 5-yo model. The new one has four times the cores, twice the RAM, a non-circus-grade ssd, a high-powered cpu as opposed to the "u" series chip the old one has. I haven't noticed any kind of difference when using Teams. That piece of crap is just as slow and borken as it always was.

Yeah people love to shit on electron and such but they're full of crap. It doesn't matter one bit for anything more powerful than a raspberry pi. Probably not even there. "Oh boo hoo chrome uses 2 gigs of ram" so what you have 16+ it doesn't matter. I swear people have some weird idea that the ideal world is one where 98% of their ram just sits unused, like the whole point of ram is to use it but whenever an applicat…

The people I trust to give good security recommendations (e.g., the leader of the Secureblue project) tell me I should completely avoid Electron (at least on Linux) because of how insecure it is. E.g., the typical Electron app pulls in many NPM packages, for which Electron does zero sandboxing.
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