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Comment by crateless | Hacker News Reader

Now that Apple has taken the lead in performance/battery life tradeoff, are there any machines which come close to the M1 for software dev? Specifically, compiling Rust, Android development etc. without giving up too much on battery life?

Also, the last time I checked, CPUs were reporting high performance but only under light load. Has the whole throttling situation changed or should I just expect to get 2 hours battery life in exchange for extreme CPU performance?

Edit: I should have specified machines that can run Linux.

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Panzerino tested WebKit compiles on the first run of M1 machines last year, and it seems like the battery held up really well on those.

> After a single build of WebKit, the M1 MacBook Pro had a massive 91% of its battery left. I tried multiple tests here and I could have easily run a full build of WebKit 8-9 times on one charge of the M1 MacBook’s battery.

https://techcrunch.com/2020/11/17/yeah-apples-m1-macbook-pro...

I'm looking forward to the MBP compile benchmarks.

Today? Probably not.

Intel's Alder Lake is moving to a Performance + Efficiency core setup, which should help overall with battery life. But they are still behind on manufacturing process (Alder Lake is "Intel 7", supposedly roughly comparable to TSMC N7), so Apple will quite likely maintain their lead in power consumption.

Alder Lake is getting announced in 2 days, but rumors have it as a desktop-first product launch, so laptops may be another quarter or two out.

> ...any machines which come close to the M1 for software dev?

If you can stand using macOS, that is.

Personally, I'll continue using Linux because that's where all my software gets deployed to and macOS simply can't approach the value of that or the value of open source. On a Mac, you'll be fighting the OS the whole time.

If speed was all that mattered, Mac users would have left Apple a long time ago because this is the first time they're faster than a PC.

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