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Comment by moduspol | Hacker News Reader

What development are you doing where there's a notable difference between an M1 Mac and a "workstation class machine?"

Is it just running a bunch of VMs? I don't doubt the tasks exist but it's got to be a list that's been dwindling for the last few years.

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Not GP, but:

Building Firefox on a macbook air or pro M1: half an hour. Fastest M1 max is around 15 minutes.

Building Firefox on my Threadripper workstation: 5 minutes.

This is also my experience. Large Rust/C/C++ code bases will easily compile 3-4x as quickly with a fast workstation as with a top end laptop. I blame thermal design and power limits

Android development, a clean build of our project on an M1 Pro is 15 minutes, a clean build from our build server (which is ultimately just a thick 11700K or something along those lines, so still relatively old) is 3 minutes.

Thermal throttling is a bitch.

I think anyone who wants a large amount of RAM or who works on projects in compiled languages will easily notice the difference.

At my job, our main software is a multi-million line c++ codebase. It takes most devs 45 minutes to an hour to compile without a fresh ccache, and this is a workstation with 8 physical cores. On my laptop, a fresh compile takes over 2 hours. This can be brought down to under 10 minutes with enough cores. Partly due to poor internal dependency management, it's pretty common that every git pull or rebase requires recompiling ~1/3 of the codebase and waiting multiple minutes to compile in an edit/compile/test cycle is common.

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