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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

#71

Post by aragonite »

kingTug wrote: post #10

Does anyone have any anecdoctal evidence around the snappiness of VsCode with Apple Silicon? I very begrudgingly switched over from SublimeText this year (after using it as my daily driver for ~10yrs). I have a beefy 2018 MBP but VScode just drags. This is the only thing pushing me to upgrade my machine right now but I'd be bummed if there's still not a significant improvement with an m3 pro.

It depends on what specifically you find slow about VSCode. In my experience, some aspects of VSCode feel less responsive than Sublime simply due to intentional design choices. For example, VSCode's goto files and project symbol search is definitely not as snappy as Sublime's. But this difference is due to VSCode's choice to use debouncing (search is triggered after typing has stopped) as opposed to throttling (restricts function execution to a set time interval).

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

#72

Post by Unfrozen0688 »

orenlindsey wrote: post #34
mgaunard wrote: post #19

[flagged]

Apple Silicon devices can get the same performance as a desktop in a laptop size. The only reason to get a desktop is if you need the Ultra chip. And, the laptop gives you extra freedom for very, very little sacrifice (at least for Apple Silicon devices). I don't see any way you can argue for a desktop.

Not possible. Sustained performance will not be the same. Desktop will be vastly better.

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

#73

Post by Aurornis »

lawrjone wrote: post #8
vessenes wrote: post #5

The upshot: M3 Pro is slightly better than M2 and significantly better than M1 Pro is what I've experienced with running local LLMs on my Macs; currently M3 memory bandwidth options are lower than for M2, and that may be hampering the total performance. Performance per watt and rendering performance are both better in the M3, but I ultimately decided to wait for an M3 Ultra with more memory bandwidth before upgrading…

This is pretty much aligned with our findings (am the author of this post). I came away feeling that: - M1 is a solid baseline - M2 improves performance by about 60% - M3 Pro is marginal on the M2, more like 10% - M3 Max (for our use case) didn’t seem that much different on the M3 Pro, though we had less data on this than other models I suspect Apple saw the M3 Pro as “maintain performance and improve efficiency” whi…

> - M2 improves performance by about 60%

This is the most shocking part of the article for me since the difference between M1 and M2 build times has been more marginal in my experience.

Are you sure the people with M1 and M2 machines were really doing similar work (and builds)? Is there a possibility that the non-random assignment of laptops (employees received M1, M2, or M3 based on when they were hired) is showing up in the results as different cohorts aren’t working on identical problems?

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

#75

Post by lawrjone »

isthisreallife9 wrote: post #60

[flagged]

Fwiw I've spent my whole career doing data analysis but the ease at which I was able to use OpenAI to help me for this post (am author) blew me away.

The fact that I can do this type of analysis is why I appreciate it so much. It's one of the reasons I'm convinced AI engineering find its way into the average software engineer's remit (https://blog.lawrencejones.dev/2023/#ai) because it makes this analysis far more accessible than it was before.

I still don't think it'll make devs redundant, though. Things the model can't help you with (yet, I guess):

- Providing it with clean data => I had to figure out what data to collect, write software to collect it, ship it to a data warehouse, clean it, then upload it into the model.

- Knowing what you want to achieve => it can help suggest questions to ask, but people who don't know what they want will still struggle to get results even from a very helpful assistant.

These tools are great though, and one of the main reasons I wrote this article was to convince other developers to start experimenting with them like this.

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

#76

Post by lawrjone »

LispSporks22 wrote: post #29

I wish I needed a fast computer. It’s the CI/CD that’s killing me. All this cloud stuff we use - can’t test anything locally anymore. Can’t use the debugger. I’m back to glorified fmt.Printf statements that hopefully have enough context that the 40 min build/deploy time was worth it. At least it’s differential ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ All I can say is “I compiles… I think?” The unit tests are mostly worthless and the setup for send…

Yeah everything you just said is exactly why we care so much about a great local environment. I've not seen remote tools approach the speed/ease/flexibility you can get from a fast local machine yet, and it makes a huge difference when developing.

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

#77

Post by tomaskafka »

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…

Everyone has a different needs - for me, even M1 Pro has more battery life than I use or need, so further efficiency differences bring little value.

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

#78

Post by dash2 »

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 means and error bars. (Or used cumulative distribution functions, where you can see if they overlap or one is shifted.)

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

#79

Post by lawrjone »

Aurornis wrote: post #73
lawrjone wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is pretty much aligned with our findings (am the author of this post). I came away feeling that: - M1 is a solid baseline - M2 improves performance by about 60% - M3 Pro is marginal on the M2, more like 10% - M3 Max (for our use case) didn’t seem that much different on the M3 Pro, though we had less data on this than other models I suspect Apple saw the M3 Pro as “maintain performance and improve efficiency” whi…

> - M2 improves performance by about 60% This is the most shocking part of the article for me since the difference between M1 and M2 build times has been more marginal in my experience. Are you sure the people with M1 and M2 machines were really doing similar work (and builds)? Is there a possibility that the non-random assignment of laptops (employees received M1, M2, or M3 based on when they were hired) is showing…

The build events track the files that were changed that triggered the build, along with a load of other stats such as free memory, whether docker was running, etc.

I took a selection of builds that were triggered by the same code module (one that frequently changes to provide enough data) and compared models on just that, finding the same results.

This feels as close as you could get for an apples-to-apples comparison, so I'm quite confident these figures are (within statistical bounds of the dataset) correct!

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

#80

Post by Aurornis »

Larrikin wrote: post #49
mgaunard wrote: post #19

[flagged]

WFH is effectively work from anywhere. I can take a month long working vacation and save a vacation day by working on the airplane. I'd be very annoyed if my work chained me to my home desk.

> WFH is effectively work from anywhere.

Great if your company allows it, but the “working vacation” thing has been either discourage or disallowed at every remote job I’ve had due to past abuse.

Some jobs can handle truly asynchronous work and some people can be responsible about getting their work done away from home, but for every 1 employee who was pulling it off well we had 3-5 more who were just writing short responses in Slack and to emails to pretend they weren’t actually on vacation. Ruined it quickly for everyone.

Lately I try to look for jobs at smaller companies where everyone can be trusted and there isn’t room for people to get away with those games. Seems much more likely to find more WFH freedom in those environments.

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