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
#2Author here, thanks for posting!
Lots of stuff in this from profiling Go compilations, building a hot-reloader, using AI to analyse the build dataset, etc.
We concluded that it was worth upgrading the M1s to an M3 Pro (the max didn’t make much of a difference in our tests) but the M2s are pretty close to the M3s, so not (for us) worth upgrading.
Happy to answer any questions if people have them.
Re: Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading
#3We've found that distributed building has pretty much eliminated the need to upgrading developer workstations. Super easy to set up, too.
Re: Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading
#4We've found that distributed building has pretty much eliminated the need to upgrading developer workstations. Super easy to set up, too.
Distributed building of what? Because for every language the answer of whether it's easy or not is probably different.
Re: Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading
#5The 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 my daily driver M1 Max.
Re: Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading
#6We've found that distributed building has pretty much eliminated the need to upgrading developer workstations. Super easy to set up, too.
I’m not sure this would work well for our use case.
The distributed build systems only really benefit from aggressively caching the modules that are built, right? But the majority of the builds we do are almost fully cached, having changed just one module that needs recompiling then the linker sticks everything back together, which the machines would then need to download from the distributed builder and at 300MB a binary that’s gonna take a while.
I may have this totally wrong though. Would distributed builds actually get us a new binary faster to the local machine?
I suspect we wouldn’t want this anyway (lots of our company work on the go, train WiFi wouldn’t cut it for this!) but interested nonetheless.
Re: Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading
#7Importing a couple thousand RAW pictures into a Capture One library would take 2 h on my 2017 iMac.
5 min on my m3 mbp pro.
Geekbench score differences were quite remarkable.
I am still wondering if I should return it, though
Re: Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading
#8The 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” which is consistent with the reduction in P-cores from the M2.
The bit I’m interested about is that you say the M3 Pro is only a bit better than the M2 at LLM work, as I’d assumed there were improvements in the AI processing hardware between the M2 and M3. Not that we tested that, but I would’ve guessed it.
Re: Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading
#9Importing a couple thousand RAW pictures into a Capture One library would take 2 h on my 2017 iMac. 5 min on my m3 mbp pro. Geekbench score differences were quite remarkable. I am still wondering if I should return it, though
Go on, I’ll bite: why?
Re: Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading
#10Does 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.