Comment by soylentnewsorg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by soylentnewsorg | Hacker News Reader

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I love how you read the first line, ignore the rest of the paragraph addressing your specific point, then proudly strut around like you called out a gotcha. "bud."

Dell Precision. 6 core xeon, 128GB RAM, 9 hour battery life. Thin and under 7lb. Metal and solid, can run over it w/ a car just like the Lenovo you're talking about. Has had a 4k screen and keyboards that don't break or imprint on the display. 5 years ago.

Apple makes shiny toys and calls them "pro." What they don't do, is compete in the actual pro market. Even when they had intel chips, they were a generation behind everyone else. This is because of the design-first mentality. And there's a market for that. Just not the pro market. Because we got shit to do, and the slower it's done, the less we get paid.

My laptop is like 5x or more faster that the Air. Unless this new apple-pro is 5x faster than the air, they're not competing. And it won't even be twice as fast. But I already said that, and this paragraph is also long, so I don't think you have the mental capacity to have read this far down. After all, 1/16 of a page of text takes minutes. Now, since you appear to be an apple user, you're probably used to minutes. I just don't think you spend the time you wait for your script reading.

I also have a Xeon laptop. (45w TDP E3-1505m v6 in a dell precision).

Xeons are not magically faster than their i7/i9 counterparts (mine being not faster than a i7-7820HQ which is its contemporary flagship high performance mobile CPU). In fact they can be slower because the emphasis is on correctness and multi core, not usually single thread performance.

Xeons are also slower than a modern AMD chip which also can have more cores.

5x is a performance metric that doesn’t match up. Unless you have a desktop class 145w/165w cpu, in which case it’s not going to get 9hrs of battery unless you’re not actually touching the CPU. More like 30 minutes of heavy use on the largest battery legally allowed in laptops.

Edit: I just took a quick snoop on geek bench and found a modern xeon w in the largest dell precision laptop available:

Single core: 929 vs 1783 for M1

Multi core: 6718 vs 12693 for M1

https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/10517773

Synthetic scores aren’t everything, but I’m hard pressed seeing how you can get 5x performance out of a chip that scores almost exactly half. Even with hardware accelerations like AVX512 (which causes a cpu to get so hot it throttles below baseline even on servers with more than adequate cooling.)

My experience as well. I, too, have a dell precision with a 8 core xeon part, and while it looks decent its heavy and not noticeably faster than the m1 I replaced it with when it came out. The xeon would get hot and noisy when running teams or hangouts. It sits in my drawer for the last year or so.

M1 does not. Code compile is about as fast. Battery lasts a 3 day business trip or a hackaton without charging. I never heard its fan. I dont care much about brands, but lightweight, fast enough and well built M1 is praiseworthy. I am not getting the pro or max, as the benefits for me as a software dev are probably not worth the extra weight and power consumption.

I guarantee you, an M1 is about as fast as your "6 core xeon" laptop. M1 Pro/Max will steamroll it. You can look at Cinebench, LLVM compile, Java benchmarks, etc. You're completely delusional claiming your laptop is 5x faster in CPU. Mocking a "phone CPU" when the A15 is actually faster than a 5950X in single core performance shows you don't know what you're talking about.

You probably wouldn’t have gotten downvoted as much if people hadn’t (ironically?) read the part you said they wouldn’t read :p And I want to mention that I agree with you about apple not selling to pros very well over the past 6 years.

Your laptop is definitely very capable. But it’s barely a laptop. Why not build out a proper desktop? This precision would be a pain in the ass to carry around for most people, especially travel. Dell made sacrifices to get that kind of power: size, cooling, and battery life. Those are actually meaningful things when it comes to a laptop for most people, even pros.

I think the fact that you’re even mentioning a MacBook <em>air</em> in the same sentence is very good for the Air. The M1 hasn’t really been marketed to the pro market until the recent release.

Also, 5x faster at what? The M1 is about the same performance as a W-11855M at single core cinebench, and only 25% slower at multicore. So comparison to the M1 pro/max is not very promising for the Xeon chip.

Engineers in the field, on oil rigs, doing CAD, Simulations etc. need huge heavy desktop replacement laptops. The licensing cost for the software they use is usually above 100_000$, and only certified for RHEL or Windows.

Even at 8k$ the laptop is often below 5% of the budget.

it's because you're using "geekbench" for your numbers. which is a combined number of misleading stats. it includes things like "encoding video" and "rendering html" - things that the m1 has specific optimizations for, which in the real world are done by the NVIDIA RTX on my Dell, with the CPU sitting at under 1% utilization. Yes, if you offload these tasks, which in the real world don't use the CPU at all, and run it on a CPU with special accelerators for these useless tasks, the CPU designed specifically to game "geekbench" metrics will win. In the real world, I got a multi-gig dataset I need to process and do calculations on. Go put a database on the M1 and see if it beats a xeon. Or for an easier test, just load up excel with lots of functions and lots of calculated rows and columns. Run that while running a couple of VMs for virtual appliances on your laptop too (128GB ECC RAM helps with that).

You're literally here saying the M1 is going to replace a server chip. Newsflash - the M1 doesn't even run any of the needed code, because it's arm code - a small niche.

Dell Precision with Xeon CPU … this thing doesn’t even have ECC ram, so it’s a toy and not suitable for actual pros.

Seriously though, your comment lacks, because of your very narrow and specific definition of „pro“.

The vast majority of people using laptops professionally, obviously prefer a MacBook Pro over a niche Dell laptop with a Xeon CPU.

Also the Geekbench score for Xeon CPUs used in Dell Precision laptops is way below that of the M1 Pro.

Dell Precision. 6 core xeon, 128GB RAM, 9 hour battery life. [...] My laptop is like 5x or more faster that the Air.

Very unlikely. You seem to go out of your way not to mention the Xeon's part number. So what Xeon is it?

Yup. I, too, call BS on that. I do own a precision laptop with a 8 core xeon and this thing is heavy, noisy and can't work on battery for more than 2hrs under normal workload.

Just for fun, I looked up the most expensive Dell Precision Xeon laptop, which seems to be the Precision 7760 with a Xeon W-11955M.

With a GeekBench score of 1647 ST/9650 MT, this $5377.88 machine is just a bit faster than the passively cooled $999 MacBook Air with 1744 ST/7600 MT. The MacBook Pro 14" 10 core is better than the Dell Xeon in about every way, performance, price, performance per watt, etc.

This is the xeon that's in the laptop. the geekbench score is base on running tests on the low power integrated graphics instead of the discreet NVIDIA RTX GPU. the numbers you idiots keep quoting are completely bogus. anywise losers, enjoy your apples, i got real work to do.

I run about 50k worth of software licenses on the laptop and generate millions in revenue per quarter with it. That's why it's a pro laptop, and I'm sure my company paid about double your number after you add in dell's pro support plus. Pro laptop for pro work. You're a kid who wants toys, but wants to say you're using professional equipment. I got something that's like the pro mac laptop. work gave that to me too for secondary tasks. it's called a dell latitude. it runs the latest i7 and no ecc memory. great for chromecasting porn and playing games in the browser, 13 hours of battery unlike the precision's 9, and much lighter. they just don't call it a pro.

you have a 5 year old precision you're comparing to an apple that came out yesterday. tell me, was the election stolen?

I would prefer your machine, though too many negatives to parse all of your post. Maybe too many words? I will shop Xeon laptops, that sounds quick.

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