Hacker News Reader

Comment by almog | Hacker News Reader

For those of you who aren't planning to run LLMs locally and picking M4 Pro/Max over the regular M4 (high) with 32GB RAM, what's your consideration for doing so other than perhaps future proofing with a higher RAM options?

Personally doing boring old software development and some random everyday stuff, I really can't see why I'd pick anything more powerful but I'd love to know if I'm missing something.

View on HN

I will gladly spend $2500 more of my employer’s money (or even my money) if it can make me 5% faster at my job. If you’re paid $100,000 its already well worth it

For sure but that reduces my question to choosing a model if they all cost the same.

I'm going to order a Mac Mini for personal use (which I'd say is 50% software development) and would like to make a cost efficient choice given id mostly do web development, data analytics and everyday stuff. Currently I'm using M2 with 16GB and rarely ever do I feel like I need more RAM so I'd like to think that getting a 32GB would be sufficient for at least few more years unless I end up needing run LLMs locally but I don't expect that.

If you’re happy with 32gb, then be happy! For me there’s a big difference between “rarely” wanting more performance and “never” wanting more performance.

I pre-ordered a 16” M4 Max MacBook Pro with 128gb of RAM. I’m going to give 16gb of heap to my compiler, my IDE, my back-end application, and my web browser / front-end application. I’ll have plenty of RAM left over to keep all the code on my machine in RAM cache.

Parallelisation of compilation for large codebases. For example, an M2 Max with 96GiB of RAM takes about 12 minutes to compile the Waterfox (aka Firefox) codebase from scratch.

Any reduction in that time saves a lot of my life over a large period of time.

Any idea what that compile time might look like for each of the M4 configurations? Also, how often do you have to compile a codebase of that size from scratch and why?

> Any idea what that compile time might look like for each of the M4 configurations?

Unfortunately not, but I'd hope to see a reduction to under 10 minutes with the M4 Pro at the very least.

> Also, how often do you have to compile a codebase of that size from scratch and why?

Very often; since Waterfox's changes are always rebased on top of Firefox, every time we pull from upstream, the build system will do a from scratch compile.

A full release build takes about 1 hr (due to monolithic LTO and PGO, which requires 2 builds and about 15 minutes of app runtime to profile).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com