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It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

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Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#41

Post by PartiallyTyped »

tgma wrote: post #23
avidiax wrote: post #10

Employers, even the rich FANG types, are quite penny-wise and pound-foolish when it comes to developer hardware. Limiting the number and size of monitors. Putting speedbumps (like assessments or doctor's notes) on ergo accessories. Requiring special approval for powerful hardware. Requiring special approval for travel, and setting hotel and airfare caps that haven't been adjusted for inflation. To be fair, I know ple…

FANG is not monolithic. Amazon is famously cheap. So is Apple in my opinion based on what I have heard (you get random refurbished hardware that is available not some standardized thing, sometimes with 8GB RAM sometimes something nicer) Apple is also famously cheap on their compensation. Back in the day they proudly said shit to the effect of "we deliberately don't pay you top of the market because you have to love A…

Not sure what you are talking about re amzn.

I have a pretty high end MacBook Pro, and that pales in comparison to the compute I have access to.

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#42

Post by PartiallyTyped »

DrNosferatu wrote: post #39

But single core performance has been stagnant for ages! Considering ‘Geekbench 6’ scores, at least. So if it’s not a task massively benefiting from parallelization, buying used is still the best value for money.

I don’t think that’s true. AMD’s ****X3D chips are evidence that’s not true, with lots of benchmarks supporting this.

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#43

Post by diminish »

Multi-core operations like compiling C/C++ could benefit.

Single thread performance of 16-core AMD Ryzen 9 9950X is only 1.8x of my poor and old laptop's 4-core i5 performance. https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/6211vs3830vs3947/AMD-Ry...

I'm waiting for >1024 core ARM desktops, with >1TB of unified gpu memory to be able to run some large LLMs with

Ping me when some builds this :)

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#44

Post by bob1029 »

DrNosferatu wrote: post #39

But single core performance has been stagnant for ages! Considering ‘Geekbench 6’ scores, at least. So if it’s not a task massively benefiting from parallelization, buying used is still the best value for money.

Single core performance has not been stagnant. We're about double where we were in 2015 for a range of workloads. Branch prediction, OoO execution, SIMD, etc. make a huge difference.

The clock speed of a core is important and we are hitting physical limits there, but we're also getting more done with each clock cycle than ever before.

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#45

Post by tgma »

PartiallyTyped wrote: post #41
tgma wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FANG is not monolithic. Amazon is famously cheap. So is Apple in my opinion based on what I have heard (you get random refurbished hardware that is available not some standardized thing, sometimes with 8GB RAM sometimes something nicer) Apple is also famously cheap on their compensation. Back in the day they proudly said shit to the effect of "we deliberately don't pay you top of the market because you have to love A…

Not sure what you are talking about re amzn. I have a pretty high end MacBook Pro, and that pales in comparison to the compute I have access to.

The OP was talking beyond just compute hardware. Stuff like this: https://www.reddit.com/r/womenintech/comments/1jusbj2/amazon...

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#46

Post by userbinator »

I wish developers, and I'm saying this as one myself, were forced to work on a much slower machine, to flush out those who can't write efficient code. Software bloat has already gotten worse by at least an order of magnitude in the past decade.

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#47

Post by zh3 »

userbinator wrote: post #46

I wish developers, and I'm saying this as one myself, were forced to work on a much slower machine, to flush out those who can't write efficient code. Software bloat has already gotten worse by at least an order of magnitude in the past decade.

Develop on a fast machine, test and optimise on a slow one?

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#48

Post by PartiallyTyped »

tgma wrote: post #45
PartiallyTyped wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure what you are talking about re amzn. I have a pretty high end MacBook Pro, and that pales in comparison to the compute I have access to.

The OP was talking beyond just compute hardware. Stuff like this: https://www.reddit.com/r/womenintech/comments/1jusbj2/amazon...

That’s fair criticism. I only corrected the hardware aspect of it all.

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#49

Post by gnfargbl »

OK, I'm convinced. Can someone tell me what to buy, specifically? Needs to run Ubuntu, support 2 x 4K monitors (3 would be nice), have at least 64GB RAM and fit on my desk. Don't particularly care how good the GPU is / is not.

Here's my starting point: gmktec.com/products/amd-ryzen™-ai-max-395-evo-x2-ai-mini-pc. Anything better?

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#50

Post by amarcheschi »

fxtentacle wrote: post #36

I wish I could. But most software nowadays is still limited by single core speed and that area hasn’t seen relevant growth in years. „Public whipping for companies who don’t parallelize their code base“ would probably help more. ;) Anyway, how many seconds does MS Teams need to boot on a top of the line CPU?

I'm forced to use teams and SharePoint in my university as a student and I hate every single interaction with it, I wish curse upon their creators, and may their descendants never have a smooth user experience with any software they use.

Except for the ridiculous laggy interface, it has some functional bugs as well such as things just disappearing for a few days and then they pop up again

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