561–570 of 942 posts
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You joke, but I think this is actually true. If companies gave their developers of client-facing software slower computers the resulting software would end up being faster.
But it would take them an order of magnitude longer to ship it. `npm install` even on a fast machine is a slog.
It may not be with fewer and less heavy dependencies!
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Yep, if you're running big IDEs (e.g. Rider/IntelliJ, Visual Studio), containers and VMs, 32GB is really a must. There always seem to be people in these threads claiming that 16GB or even 8GB is enough - I just don't understand how that could possibly be for most of the HN demographic.
Do you think most of the HN demographic is actually running big IDEs, containers and VMs at the same time? I'm personally a CS student and never had to run more than a few lightweight docker containers + maybe one running some kind of database + VS Code and that has been working fine on a laptop with 8GB and pop_os. Could imagine that a lot of other people on HN are also just generally interested in tech but not nece…
I do most of my development in Chrome, bash, and sublime text and I'm still using 28GB of RAM.
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> I'm a C++ programer and my workstation has 128GB of ram and I wouldn't accept any less What on earth are you programming?
AAA video games do that for you :P Well, it isn't the programming part that uses the ram(although yes, building our codebase takes about 40 minutes and uses gigabytes of ram without using distributed build), but just starting up local server + client + editor easily uses 80-100GB of ram since ALL of the assets are loaded in.
I'm asking because I read a lot of comments when it was released that it just doesn't need as much RAM because $REASONS. I wouldn't put my money on this, but I'm curious if this assumption holds water now that people have had time to try it out.
Edit: there are such comments further down the thread where it seems to still be a mystery: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26913643
So I'd really like to know where this magic breaks down: if you're used to 128GB or RAM, will the M1 feel sluggish?
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But have you benchmarked your workflow on x86+32GB vs M1+8GB?
I'm typing this response on a 8GB M1. It's great, but its no magic. Its limitations do start to show in memory intensive and heavily multi-threaded workloads. Getting some down votes, which I attribute to reasonable skepticism, so hopefully this will allay your concerns. https://ibb.co/VM4Z1DY
Such as?
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Given Apple had/has competitive products with 2020/21 Intel CPUs this is patently not true.
Hm, I'm surprised by that statement. The Ryzen 5000 mobile CPUs were a lot faster than the Intel competition and I am pretty sure Apple does not have them in any laptop. And the very fast SSD is a new addition, isn't it? Did I miss something?
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> I've always thought Intel's marketing was a bit confused - i7 stays the same over 10+ years I think that is because the performance has been the same for the past 10+ years.
I am continually astounded that the quad core sandy bridge core-i7 I bought in January 2011 is still completely serviceable for pretty much all tasks outside of gaming. The bezel and overall form factor is clownishly large by todays standards, and the screen is starting to look a bit faded, but as a portable but mostly stationary PC it still works great alongside my main laptop I use for work. I knew back in 2011 I w…
That thing flies for anything and everything I put it through.
One day I'll retire it as a gaming machine and convert it to a Linux server or a casual workstation and I am sure it's going to be even faster than Win10.
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> But the Ryzen 5000 mobile chips really don't look bad at all in comparison, and a 5nm version of those would level the field. Not look too bad best to say. Even if we add a one node advantage, we still have a ~15 watt chip making 20W-30W chips sweat. If you downclock Zen 3 to match 15W TDP, you may well get M1 beating it by double digit margin. M1 is simply a way more efficient chip than any X86 chip can be because…
That's not how downclocking chips work. Reducing the wattage reduces performance by much less. In multicore workloads Zen 3 slaps the M1 even per watt.
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I am continually astounded that the quad core sandy bridge core-i7 I bought in January 2011 is still completely serviceable for pretty much all tasks outside of gaming. The bezel and overall form factor is clownishly large by todays standards, and the screen is starting to look a bit faded, but as a portable but mostly stationary PC it still works great alongside my main laptop I use for work. I knew back in 2011 I w…
I have to admit this is right. Even my old 2012 i7 Mac mini is still a perfectly serviceable machine to this day.
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That is really a problem only if you watch tech news. In reality people use computers for years, so having a 4 or 5 year old tech doesn't really matter that much.
It means the usable life is shorter, so even if it’s fine for a while, you need to think of it as a much more expensive device per useful year.
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X cores + X gigs of RAM does not mean better performance for higher values of X. That is the fundamental innovation of Apple Silicon, which people still struggle to grasp. The M1 upended how we think about CPU performance. It's not even a CPU, it's a unified memory architecture with hardware-level optimizations for macOS. You can't even cleanly compare the performance benefits of having memory and CPU on the same chi…
But we still live in a physical universe where there are voluminous things some of us need to put into ram. Things like big projects, application servers, database servers, IDEs, and for some of those - multiple instances of them. On top of that, browsers with tabs open, productivity tools. Can't benchmark out of that.
You still have to try it out and see. I'd welcome an article detailing a dev setup where the M1 isn't suitable because of performance reasons. So far we've seen mostly praise.