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Comment by doikor | Hacker News Reader

> Just Buy M1 if you'd like to have a low-power, long-lasting, quiet, and performant dev machine.

If your development environment/tooling/workflow does not gain any real advantage from more CPU cores. Also your data must fit in the 16GB of RAM as offloading any workload to disk will kill the performance and you cannot add more.

The M1 has excellent single core performance so any task that is mainly single threaded will do really well on it.

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Yes, I'd really like to see a large c++ project compile added to that list of benchmarks.

Here is example of that (compilation benchmarks) for Ryzen 5950X

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ryzen-59...

> For the code compilation speed tests were compiking Apache, PHP, the Linux kernel, ImageMagick, GDB, LLVM, FFmpeg, and MPlayer

Anything trivially parallel like a large C++ scratch build is obviously going to run faster if you have many more cores even if those cores are slower. What I'd specifically like to see is a benchmark of the long pole of most builds: the single-threaded link step.

Yep. But these days for anything else, I just fire up a cloud VM and kill it when it's done. I spent less on that than the 3900X and RAM would have cost me in 5 years.

My main daily driver machine and dev box is now the absolute ass end M1 Mac Mini and it's the best computer I have ever had.

I pretty much do work that needs more then 16GB of memory all day every day (and can take advantage of CPU cores up to 12 to 16 range). But yeah very dependent on your environment/workflow.

Especially if you are just doing lightweight web dev 16GB is more then enough (could probably get away with 8GB or less)

My primary dev environment is in ec2. I don't really care about multiple monitors. It's so convenient.

Can you tell me more about your setup? Like which ec2 instance size, remote desktop software, and any other tips? I’ve considered doing the same.

I use different size instances, but I use SSH (mosh), tmux, and vscoder through the browser, when I "need" an IDE.

on my MacBook Air, I use azure data studio to connect to our MSSQL instances if I need a UI view of our database.

What do multiple monitors have to do with having a dev env on EC2?

But on a similar note, I use VS Code's Remote SSH plugin to connect to an EC2 on one monitor and terminal + browser on the other. It's not my primary dev env, but it's great for experiments and side projects.

I sit here with 24GB memory usage just from my browser, a couple PDFs and two IDEs (Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code).

Yeah that’s like one chrome tab running slack.

Your computer always uses as much memory as possible. That’s not evidence it wouldn’t work with less.

I have 64GB memory and still occasionally get OOMs with my dev workload.

As always, it depends what you're doing.

What are you doing?

M1 has 4 big and 4 small cores. Gaming performance might suffer with a non macos system because os might not know to use bigger cores for performance intensive tasks.

Or if the bottleneck in your workflow is RAM read/write speed as opposed to RAM capacity. The RAM being on the same chip as the CPU/GPU gives it tremendously low RAM latency, which seems to be where it's getting much of its edge in these tests

The M1 has pretty high memory latency at around 100 ns [1], which is significantly higher than either AMD or Intel for typical systems. Note that physical distance between CPU and memory is rather less important for latency, as DRAM is high latency in itself, so adding a few ns at most due to wiring is not going to matter.

[1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste...

Thanks for the thorough correction.

The RAM is not on the same chip. It's regular LPDDR4X chips on the same package (connected by regular-ass PCB traces, not even a silicon interposer like HBM would've been). It's clocked pretty high, but you can go even faster on DDR4 desktops.

How do we know yet if it's long-lasting?

It's most likely in reference to the battery life not hardware life.

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