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Comment by nextos | Hacker News Reader

This is very interesting because PC workstations have been stagnating for quite long! It'd be cool to be able to bring medium-sized tasks back from clouds to personal computers.

The CPU performance is impressive but I wonder how well it'd fare against say an AMD ThreadRipper or a dual socket system with an equivalent price? It'd be also interesting to see a deep learning benchmark against Nvidia. Branding and RAM limits suggest this is geared towards video processing, but might also be useful for some other domains.

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My workstation has a 3990x.

Our "world" build is slightly faster on my M1 Max.

https://twitter.com/kiratpandya/status/1457438725680480257

The 3990x runs a bit faster on the initial compile stage but the linking is single threaded and the M1 Max catches up at that point. I expect the M1 Ultra to crush the 3990x on compile time.

Time for your linker vendor to parallelize their algorithm.

Osmos.io is built on Rust so that’s LLVM. No commercial vendor involved.

There is Mold (https://github.com/rui314/mold) as an alternative but it doesn’t support MacOS yet and that’s a blocker for our team.

Even if they stagnate, you can at least pull out a GPU and replace it with another (when they're available for purchase) even if you don't change RAM/CPU which you could replace when faster is better as well. You can even change storage options.

None of that swapability is available on any of the Apple systems, so when they stagnate there's nothing that can be done.

Practically this doesn't often happen, especially on work machines. All the parts are loosely linked by generation. It's not often you want to jump forward 5 years in GPU tech but not want an upgrade in every other field. Unless you are swapping parts out yearly for the absolute latest bit, there is not a whole lot of benefit over selling your existing device and getting the new one where you will see improvements across the board.

Okay, what happens if something fails/dies? At least it's replaceable by the user. It's very common to upgrade the RAM capacity rather than buying it all at once. Many CPUs have stuck around long enough to see GPUs replaced. Hard drives get swapped out for faster/more space.

I love the idea of component machines, but at this time of my life, I would be just fine to never have build another PC. With that, these systems of plug in the cables and go to work are appealing. Having said that, it still rubs me the wrong way on how non-upgradeable these things are.

It's true. But then if you are only interested in swapping RAM or GPUs, you can keep your machine for a long time.

When or if.

> This is very interesting because PC workstations have been stagnating for quite long!

How have they stagnated?

Look at

https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/workstations-isv-certif...

or the HP equivalent - they're still equipping them with Xeon's from 2 1/2 years ago. So pretty stagnant.

Lots of other vendors use new Xeons. You can build one at Titan Computers for under $2500.

Depending on your use case. Assuming no video editing (since this is HN), for equivalent performance I guess they can't beat their rivals on price. Different story for power tho.

Why does HN mean no editing? I'm a dev and video editor and get a lot of work done with dev tools that would take in ungodly amount of time to do as a human.

There are a few people who frequent HN who do quite a bit of video and multimedia work ;)

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