It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

No doubt the math checks out, but I wonder if developer productivity can be quantified that easily. I believe there's a lot of research pointing to people having a somewhat fixed amount of cognitive capacity available per day, and that aligns well with my personal experience. A lot of times, waiting for the computer to finish feels like a micro-break that saves up energy for my next deep thought process.

Most of my friends at FAANG all do their work on servers remotely. Remote edit, remote build. The builds happen in giant networked cloud builders, 100s to 1000s per build. Giving them a faster local machine would do almost nothing because they don't do anything local.

When I worked at a FAANG, most developers could get remote virtual machine for their development needs. They could pick the machine type and size. It was one of the first thing you'd learn how to do in your emb^H^H^H onboarding :)

So it wasn't uncommon to see people with a measly old 13" macbook pro doing the hard work on a 64cpu/256GB remote machine. Laptops were essentially machines used for reading/writing emails, writing documents and doing meetings. The IDEs had a proprietary extensions to work with remote machines and the custom tooling.

> it rarely if ever makes sense to buy anything but the top spec Macbook Pro available

God I wish my employers would stop buying me Macbook Pros and let me work on a proper Linux desktop. I'm sick of shitty thermally throttled slow-ass phone chips on serious work machines.

Wish my employers didn’t same calculation.

Gave developers 16GB RAM and 512MB storage. Spent way too much time worrying about available disk space and needlessly redownloading docker images off the web.

But at least they saved money on hardware expenses!

I always bought a really large monitor for work with my own cash. When most dev's had 19" or 20" I got a 30" for $1500.

best money ever spent. lasted years and years.

for cpus - I wonder how the economics work out when you get into say 32 or 64 core threadrippers? I think it still might be worth it.

FAANG manages the machines. Setting aside the ethics of this level of monitoring, I'd be curious to validate this by soft-limiting OS memory usage and tracking metrics like number of PRs and time someone is actively on the keyboard.

My personal experience using virtual desktops vs a MacBook aligns with your analysis. This despite the desktop virtual machines having better network connections. A VM with 16 GB of memory and 8 VCPUs can't compete with an M1 Max laptop.

To put a massive spanner in this, companies are going to be rolling out seemingly mandatory AI usage, which has huge compute requirements .. which are often fulfilled remotely. And has varying, possibly negative, effects on productivity.

I think those working on user-facing apps could do well having a slow computer or phone, just so they can get a sense of what the actual user experience is like.

No doubt you mean well. In some cases it’s obvious- low memory machine can’t handle some docket setup, etc.

In reality, you can’t even predict time to project completion accurately. Rarely is a fast computer a “time saver”.

Either it’s a binary “can this run that” or a work environment thing “will the dev get frustrated knowing he has to wait an extra 10 minutes a day when a measly $1k would make this go away”

I wish I was compiler bound. Nowadays, with everything being in the cloud or whatever I'm more likely to be waiting for Microsoft's MFA (forcing me to pick up my phone, the portal to distractions) or getting some time limited permission from PIM.

The days when 30 seconds pauses for the compiler was the slowest part are long over.

IO bound compiler would be weird. Memory, perhaps, but newer CPUs also tend to be able to communicate with RAM faster, so...

I think just having LSP give you answers 2x faster would be great for staying in flow.

In some cases, the bottlenecks are external.

I've seen a test environment which has most assets local but a few shared services and databases accessed over a VPN which is evidently a VIC-20 connected over dialup.

The dev environment can take 20 seconds to render a page that takes under 1 second on prod. Going to a newer machine with twice the RAM bought no meaningful improvement.

They need a rearchitecture of their dev system far more than faster laptops.

I got my boss to get me the most powerful server we could find, $15000 or so. In benchmarks there was minimal benefit and sometimes a loss going with more than 40 cores even though it has 56. (52? - I can't check now) sometimes using more cores slows the build down. We have concluded that memory bandwidth is the limit, but are not sure how to prove it.

A lot of people miss the multi-core advantage. A lot of times the number of cores is an almost linear decrease in compile time.

You do need a good SSD though. There is a new generation of pcie5 SSDs that came out that seems like it might be quite a bit faster.

I don’t think that we live in an era where a hardware update can bring you down to 3s from 30s, unless the employer really cheaped out on the initial buy.

Now in the tfa they compare laptop to desktop so I guess the title should be “you should buy two computers”

Another thing to keep in mind when compiling is adding more cores doesn't help with link time, which is usually stuck to a single core and can be a bottleneck.

You could buy a SSD with SLC cache that is bigger than in 2011 pure SLC one, and probably cheaper.

Really depends on your use case. I personally still run my 17 year old 2.4GHz Core 2 duo with 4GB of RAM as my daily runner. I simply do not hit the walls even on that thing. Most folks here simply would not accept that and not because they are spoilt but their works loads demand more.

If you don't care about power efficiency, sure ;)

It very much depends on the games you play though. When I upgraded from a 7700k, it was struggling with my Factorio world. My AMD 5700X3D handles it completely smoothly. Though now in Path of Exile 2, my CPU can barely maintain 30 fps during big fights.

I upgraded two years ago to a Ryzen 5700 rather than a 5800 specifically for the lower TDP. I rarely max out the cores and the cooler system means the fan rarely spins up to audible levels.

E5-2650v2 in a Chinese mATX motherboard for me. Got the cpu years ago for like $50 as an eBay server pull. 970 Evo SSD. 24GB of mismatched DDR3. Runs all my home server junk and my dev environment (containerized with Incus). Every year I tell myself I should grab a newer Ryzen to replace it but it honestly just keeps chugging along and doesn't really slow me down.

> Is it worth to keep your old CPU?

I just "re-cycle" them.

Bought a 7700X two years ago. My 3600X went to my wife. Previous machine (forgot which one it was but some Intel CPU) went to my mother-in-law. Machine three machines before that, my trusty old Core i7-6700K from 2015 (I think 2015): it's now a little Proxmox server at home.

I'll probably buy a 9900X or something now: don't want to wait late 2026/2027 for Zen 6 to come out. 7700X shall go to the wife, 3600X to the kid.

My machines typically work for a very long time: I carefully pick the components and assemble them myself and then test them. Usually when I pull the plug for the final time, it's still working fine.

But yet I like to be not too far behind: my 7700X from 2022 is okay. But I'll still upgrade. Doesn't mean it's not worth keeping: I'll keep it, just not for me.

> The i7-4770 was one. It reliably outperformed later Intel CPUs until near 10th gen or so.

Per which benchmarks?

> At 13th gen, Intel swaps E for P cores.

One nit, Intel started adding (not swapping) E-cores to desktop parts with 12th gen, but i3 parts and most i5 parts were spared. More desktop i5 parts got them as starting with 13th gen.

What's wrong with E cores? They're the best bang for the buck for both baseline low-power usage (and real-world systems are idle a lot of the time) and heavy multicore workloads. An E-core cluster takes a tiny fraction of area and power compared to a P-core, so it's not just a one-on-one comparison.

You simply cannot cram enough cooling and power into a laptop to have it equal a desktop high end desktop CPU of the same generation. There is physically not enough room. Just about the only way to even approach that would be to have liquid cooling loop ports out the back that you had to plug into an under-desk cooling loop and I don't think anyone is doing that because at that point just get a frickin desktop computer + all the other conveniences that come with it (discrete peripherals, multiple monitors, et cetera). I honestly do not understand why so many devs seem to insist on doing work on a laptop. My best guess is this is mostly the apple crowd because apple "desktops" are for the most part - just the same hardware in a larger box instead of being actually a different class of machine. A little better on the thermals, but not the drastic jump you see between laptops and desktops from AMD and Intel.

* Me shamefully hiding my no-fan MBA used for development... *

Every well funded startup I’ve worked for went through a period where employees could get nearly anything they asked for: New computers, more monitors, special chairs, standing desks, SaaS software, DoorDash when working late. If engineers said they needed it, they got it.

Then some period of time later they start looking at spending in detail and can’t believe how much is being spent by the 25% or so who abuse the possibly. Then the controls come.

> There is abuse. But that abuse is really capped out at a few thousand in laptops, monitors and workstations, even with high-end specs,

You would think, but in the age of $6,000 fully specced MacBook Pros, $2,000 monitors, $3,000 standing desks, $1500 iPads with $100 Apple pencils and $300 keyboard cases, $1,000 chairs, SaaS licenses that add up, and (if allowed) food delivery services for “special circumstances” that turns into a regular occurrence it was common to see individuals incurring expenses in the tens of thousands range. It’s hard to believe if you’re a person who moderates their own expenditures.

Some people see a company policy as something meant to be exploited until a hidden limit is reached.

There also starts to be some soft fraud at scales higher than you’d imagine: When someone could get a new laptop without questions, old ones started “getting stolen” at a much higher rate. When we offered food delivery for staying late, a lot of people started staying just late enough for the food delivery to arrive while scrolling on their phones and then walking out the door with their meal.

I know a FAANG company whose IT department, for the last few years, has been "out of stock" for SSD drives over 250GB . They claim its a global market issue (it's not). There's constant complaining in the chats for folks who compile locally. The engineers make $300k+ so they just buy a second SSD from Amazon on their credit cards and self-install them without mentioning it to the IT dept. I've never heard a rational explanation for the "shortage" other than chronic incompetence from the team supplying engineers with laptops/desktops. Meanwhile, spinning up a 100TB cloud VM has no friction whatsoever there. It's a cushy place to work tho, so folks just accept the comically dumb aspects everyone knows about.

I think you're maybe underestimating the aggregate cost of totally unconstrained hardware/travel spending across tens or hundreds of thousands of employees, and overestimating the benefits. There need to be some limits or speedbumps to spending, or a handful of careless employees will spend the moon.

It's not abuse to open 500 Chrome tabs if they're work-related and increase my productivity.

I am 100x more expensive than the laptop. Anything the laptop can do instead of me is something the laptop should be doing instead of me.

I agree with your overall point, but:

> But that abuse is really capped out at a few thousand

That abuse easily goes into the tens of thousands of dollars, even several hundred thousand, even at a relatively small shop. I just took a quick look at Apple's store, and wow! The most expensive 14" MacBook Pro I could configure (minus extra software) tops out at a little over $7,000! The cheapest is at $1,600, and a more reasonably-specced, mid-range machine (that is probably perfectly sufficient for dev work), can be had for $2,600.

Let's even round that up to $3,000. That's $4,000 less than the high end. Even just one crazy-specced laptop purchase would max out your "capped out at a few thousand" figure.

And we're maybe not even talking about abuse all the time. An employee might fully earnestly believe that they will be significantly more productive with a spec list that costs $4,000, when in reality that $3,000 will be more or less identical for them.

Multiply these individual choices out to a 20 or 40 or 60 person team, and that's real money, especially for a small startup. And we haven't even started talking about monitors and fancy ergonomic chairs and stuff. 60 people spending on average $2,000 each more than they truly need to spend will cost $120k. (And I've worked at a place that didn't eliminate their "buy whatever you think you'll need" policies until they had more than 150 employees!)

Just to do web development? I regularly go into swap running everything I need on my laptop. Ideally I'd have VScode, webpack, and jest running continuously. I'd also occasionally need playwright. That's all before I open a chrome tab.

Always amuses me when I see someone use web development as an example like this. Web dev is very easily in the realm of game dev as far as required specs for your machine, otherwise you're probably not doing much actual web dev. If anything, engineers doing nothing but running little Java or Python servers don't need anything more than a PI and a two-color external display to do their job.

FANG is not monolithic. Amazon is famously cheap. So is Apple in my opinion based on what I have heard (you get random refurbished hardware that is available not some standardized thing, sometimes with 8GB RAM sometimes something nicer) Apple is also famously cheap on their compensation. Back in the day they proudly said shit to the effect of "we deliberately don't pay you top of the market because you have to love Apple" to which the only valid answer is "go fuck yourself."

Google and Facebook I don't think are cheap for developers. I can speak firsthand for my past Google experience. You have to note that the company has like 200k employees and there needs to be some controls and not all of the company are engineers.

Hardware -> for the vast majority of stuff, you can build with blaze (think bazel) on a build cluster and cache, so local CPU is not as important. Nevertheless, you can easily order other stuff should you need to. Sure, if you go beyond the standard issue, your cost center will be charged and your manager gets an email. I don't think any decent manager would block you. If they do, change teams. Some powerful hardware that needs approval is blanket whitelisted for certain orgs that recognize such need.

Trips -> Google has this interesting model you have a soft cap for trips and if you don't hit the cap, you pocket half of the trips credit in your account which you can choose to spend later when you are overcap or you want to get something slightly nicer the next time. Also, they have clear and sane policies on mixing personal and corporate travel. I encourage everyone to learn about and deploy things like that in their companies. The caps are usually not unreasonable, but if you do hit them, it is again an email to your management chain, not some big deal. Never seen it blocked. If your request is reasonable and your manager is shrugging about this stuff, that should reflect on them being cheap not the company policy.

What would be a good incentivizing strategy to prevent over spending on hardware? I can think of giving a budget and the amount not spend is payed out to them (but when the salary is that high it might not make sense) or like having a internal dashboard where everybody can see every body’s spending on hardware, so people feel bad when they order to much.

It's straightforward to measure this; start a stopwatch every time your flow gets interrupted by waiting for compilation or your laptop is swapping to keep the IDE and browser running, and stop it once you reach flow state again.

We managed to just estimate the lost time and management (in a small startup) was happy to give the most affected developers (about 1/3) 48GB or 64GB MacBooks instead of the default 16GB.

At $100/hr minimum (assuming lost work doesn't block anyone else) it doesn't take long for the upgrades to pay off. The most affected devs were waiting an hour a day sometimes.

This applies to CI/CD pipelines too; it's almost always worth increasing worker CPU/RAM while the reduction in time is scaling anywhere close to linearly, especially because most workers are charged by the minute anyway.

"even the rich FANG types"

I think you wanted to say "especially". You're exchanging clearly measurable amounts of money for something extremely nebulous like "developer productivity". As long as the person responsible for spend has a clear line of view on what devs report, buying hardware is (relatively) easy to justify.

Once the hardware comes out of a completely different cost center - a 1% savings for that cost center is promotion-worthy, and you'll never be able to measure a 1% productivity drop in devs. It'll look like free money.

With compiler development work, a low end machine will do just fine, as long as it has a LARGE monitor. (Mine is 3840x2160, and I bought a satellite monitor to extend it.)

P.S. you can buy a satellite monitor often for $10 from the thrift store. The one I bought was $10.

I don't buy used keyboards because they are dirty and impossible to clean.

> highest spec MacBook just to do web development and open 500 chrome tabs. There is abuse.

Why is that abuse? Having many open browser tabs is perfectly legitimate.

Arguably they should switch from Chrome to Safari / lobby Google to care about client-side resource use, but getting as much RAM as possible also seems fine.

This is especially relevant now that docker has made it easy to maintain local builds of the entire app (fe+be). Factor in local AI flows and the RAM requirements explode.

I have a whisper transcription module running at all times on my Mac. Often, I'll have a local telemetry service (langfuse) to monitor the 100s of LLM calls being made by all these models. With AI development it isnt uncommon to have multiple background agents hogging compute. I want each of them to be able to independently build + host and test their changes. The compute load apps up quickly. And I would never push agent code to a cloud env (not even a preview env) because I don't trust them like that and neither should you.

Anything below an M4 pro 64GB would be too weak for my workflow. On that point, Mac's unified VRAM is the right approach in 2025. I used windows/wsl devices for my entire life, but their time is up.

This workflow is the first time I have needed multiple screens. Pre-agentic coding, I was happy to work on a 14 inch single screen machine with standard thinkpad x1 specs. But, the world has changed.

Isn't it about equal treatment? You can't buy one person everything they want, just because they have high salary, otherwise the employee next door will get salty.

Not providing 2 monitors to those who want is hare-brained. As far as I'm concerned, 2 monitors = 2x more efficient working.

Yes, just went from i3770 (12 years old!) to a 9900x as I tend to wait for a doubling of single core performance before upgrading (got through a lot of PCs in the 386/486 era!). It's actually only 50% faster according to cpubenchmark [0] but is twice as fast in local usage (multithread is reported about 3 times faster).

Also got a Mac Mini M4 recently and that thing feels slow in comparison to both these systems - likely more of a UI/software thing (only use M4 for xcode) than being down to raw CPU performance.

[0] https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-i9-9900K-vs-Intel...

I jumped ahead about 5 generations of Intel, when I got my new laptop and while the performance wasn't much better, the fact that I changed from a 10 pound workstation beast that sounded like a vacuum cleaner, to a svelte 13 inch laptop that works with a tiny USB C brick, and barely runs its fans while being just as fast made it worthwhile for me.

I think people overestimate the value of a little bump in performance. I recently built a gaming PC with a 9700X. The 9800X3D is drastically more popular, for an 18% performance bump on benchmarks but double the power draw. I rarely peg my CPU, but I am always drawing power.

Higher power draw means it runs hotter, and it stresses the power supply and cooling systems more. I'd rather go a little more modest for a system that's likely to wear out much, much slower.

Not even. Probably closer to 30%, and that's if you are doing actual many-core compile workloads on your critical path.

The author used kernel compilation as a benchmark. Which is weird, because for most projects a build process isn't as scalable as that (especially in the node.js ecosystem), even less after a full build.

I suspect that's a very slimmed-down .config and probably only e.g. `make bzImage`, versus something like a Debian kernel .config with modules, headers, etc. A full Ubuntu kernel takes quite a bit longer on my 5950X, which is admittedly quite a bit slower than a 9950X but still no laggard. I'll time it and update this comment later...

ETA: After dropping caches it took 18m40s to build Ubuntu mainline 6.16.3 with gcc-14 on my 5950X, with packages for everything including linux-doc, linux-rust-lib, linux-source, etc. I'd expect the same operation to take about 11m on a 9950X.

It's also not clear whether OP used Clang or GCC to build the kernel. Clang would be faster.

In 2003, Egenera boxes could compile Linux in around 15 seconds.

Even my dual 7402 with 96 threads and 512 GiB of RAM can't compile a maximal Linux config x86 build in RAM in under 3 minutes.

What I find helps repeated builds is maintaining a memcache server instance for sccache.

I remember I was blown away by some machine that compiled it in ~45 minutes. Pentium Pro baby! Those were the days.

Spinning hard drives were soooo slow! Maybe very roughly an order of magnitude from SSDs and an order of magnitude from multi-core?

I'd like to know why making debian packages containing the kernel now takes substantially longer than a clean build of the kernel. That seems deeply wrong and rather reduces the joy at finding the kernel builds so quickly.

Yeah, I recognize this all too well. There is an implicit assumption that all hardware is top-tier, all phones are flagships, all mobile internet is 5G, everyone has regular access to free WiFi, etc.

Engineers and designers should compile on the latest hardware, but the execution environment should be capped at the 10th percentile compute and connectivity at least one rotating day per week.

Employees should be nudged to rotate between Android and IOS on a monthly or so basis. Gate all the corporate software and ideally some perks (e.g. discounted rides as a ride-share employee) so that you have to experience both platforms.

My biggest pet peeve is designers using high end apple displays.

You've average consumer is using a ultra cheap LCD panel that has no where near the contrast ratio that you are designing your mocks on, all of your subtle tints get saturated out.

This is similar to good audio engineers back in the day wiring up a dirt cheap car speaker to mix albums.

They shouldn't work on a slower machine - however they should test on a slower machine. Always.

> were forced to work on a much slower machine

I feel like that's the wrong approach. Like saying a music producer to always work with horrible (think car or phone) speakers. True, you'll get a better mix and master if you test it on speakers you expect others to hear it through, but no one sane recommends you to default to use those for day-to-day work.

Same goes for programming, I'd lose my mind if everything was dog-slow, and I was forced to experience this just because someone thinks I'll make things faster for them if I'm forced to have a slower computer. Instead I'd just stop using my computer if the frustration ended up larger than the benefits and joy I get.

> can't write efficient code. Software bloat has already gotten worse by at least an order of magnitude in the past decade.

Efficiency is a good product goal: Benchmarks and targets for improvement are easy to establish and measure, they make users happy, thinking about how to make things faster is a good way to encourage people to read the code that's there, instead of just on new features (aka code that's not there yet)

However they don't sell very good: Your next customer is probably not going to be impressed your latest version is 20% faster than the last version they also didn't buy. This means that unless you have enough happy customers, you are going to have a hard time convincing yourself that I'm right, and you're going to continue to look for backhanded ways of making things better.

But reading code, and re-reading code is the only way you can really get it in your brain; it's the only way you can see better solutions than the compiler, and it's the only way you remember you have this useful library function you could reuse instead of writing more and more code; It's the only guaranteed way to stop software bloat, and giving your team the task of "making it better" is a great way to make sure they read it.

When you know what's there, your next feature will be smaller too. You might even get bonus features by making the change in the right place, instead of as close to the user as possible.

Management should be able to buy into that if you explain it to them, and if they can't, maybe you should look elsewhere...

> a much slower machine

Giving everyone laptops is also one of those things: They're slow even when they're expensive, and so developers are going to have to work hard to make things fast enough there, which means it'll probably be fine when they put it on the production servers.

I like having a big desktop[1] so my workstation can have lots of versions of my application running, which makes it a lot easier to determine which of my next ideas actually makes things better.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44501119

Using the best/fastest tools I can is what makes me faster, but my production hardware (i.e. the tin that runs my business) is low-spec because that's cheaper, and higher-spec doesn't have a measurable impact on revenue. But I measure this, and I make sure I'm always moving forward.

Develop on a fast machine, test and optimise on a slow one?

Perhaps the better solution would be to have the fast machine but have a pseudo VM for just the software you are developing that uses up all of those extra resources with live analysis. The software runs like it is on a slower machine, but you could potentially gather plenty of info that would enable you to speed up the program for everyone.

The beatings will continue until the code improves.

I get the sentiment but taken literally it's counter productive. If the business cares about perf, put it in the sprint planning. But they don't. You'll just be writing more features with more personal pain.

For what its worth, console gamedev has solved this. You test your game on the weakest console you're targeting. This usually shakes out as a stable perf floor for PC.

I came here to say exactly this.

If developers are frustrated by compilation times on last-generation hardware, maybe take a critical look at the code and libraries you're compiling.

And as a siblimg comment notes, absolutely all testing should be on older hardware, without question, and I'd add with deliberately lower-quality and -speed data connections, too.

I'll agree with one modification: developers should be forced to test on a much slower machine.

My final compiled binary runs much faster than something written in, say, python or javascript, but my oh my is the rust compiler (and rust-analyzer) slow compared to the nonexistent compile steps in those other languages.

But for the most part the problem here isn't developers. It's product management and engineering managers. They just do not make performance a priority. Just like they often don't make bug-fixing and robustness a priority. It's all "features features features" and "time to market" and all that junk.

Maybe make the product managers use 5-year-old mid-range computers. Then when they test the stuff the developers have built, they'll freak out about the performance and prioritize it.

Contrarian here. I wish all product managers were forced to work on a much slower machine, so that "make this shit fast" becomes the highest priority issue in the backlog.

Nobody is writing slow code specifically to screw over users with old devices. They're doing it because it's the easiest way to get through their backlog of Other Things. As an example, it is a priority for a lot of competitive games, and they perform really well on everything from the latest 5090 to a pretty-old laptop integrated graphics GPU. It's done not because they only hired rockstar performance experts, but because it was a product priority.

Efficiency costs development time and thus money. Computers getting faster is what made software development cheaper and possible to use for solving problems.

Usually software gets developed to be so fast that people just barely accept it with the computers of their time. You can do better by setting explicit targets like the RAIL model by google. Optimizing any further usually is just a waste of resources.

it's absolutely the wrong approach.

software should be performance tested, but you don't want a situation when time of single iteration is dominated by duration of functional tests and build time. the faster software builds and tests, the quicker solutions get delivered. if giving your developers 64GB or RAM instead of 32GB halves test and build time, you should happily spend that money.

Right, optimize for horrible tools so the result satisfies the bottom 20%. Counterpoint, id Software produced amazingly performant programs using top of the line gear. What are you trying to do is enforce a cultural norm by hobbling the programmer's hardware. If you want fast programs, you need to make that a criteria, slow hardware isn't going to get you there.

i work as a mid-level engg with a 4+ yo dell (handed down to me when i joined), which is the same generic laptop that someone from admin team receives. some of my colleagues also share similar specs, and we were yet to be lucky to be given an upgrade.

might be down to the tech culture here, but we don't automatically write the most efficient code either. for a lot of simple projects, these "bad" machines are still capable enough unfortunately.

I wish this hell on other developers, too. ;-)

Yeah but working with windows, visual studio and cooperate security software in a 8gb machine is just pain

Web development is crazy. Went from a Java/C codebase to a webdev company using TS. The latter would take minutes to build. The former would build in seconds and you could run a simulated backtest before the web app would be ready.

It blew my mind. Truly this is more complicated than trading software.

Yup. Occasionally I wonder whether it's time to upgrade (5800X3D / 3090), do a back of envelope calc on cost vs incremental gains and very quickly decide I'm good for now

5950x is such a great platform. I can’t see replacing mine for several years at least.

Right now I am on my ancient cheap laptop with some 4 core intel and hard drive noises, the only time it has issues with webpages is when I have too many tabs open for its 4gigs of ram. My current laptop which is a 16 core Rhyzen 7 from about 2021 (x13) has never had an issue and I have yet to have too many tabs open on it. I think you might be having a OS/browser issue.

As an aside, being on my old laptop with its hard drive, can't believe how slow life was before SSDs. I am enjoying listening to the hard drive work away and I am surprised to realize that I missed it.

As an alternative anecdote, I've got a Ryzen 7 5800X from 2021, and it's stil blazingly fast for just about everything I throw at it...

Maybe, but I can’t repro. Do you have a GPU? What browser? What web site? How much RAM do you have, and how much is available? What else is running on your machine? What OS, and is it a work machine with corporate antivirus?

I'm forced to use teams and SharePoint in my university as a student and I hate every single interaction with it, I wish curse upon their creators, and may their descendants never have a smooth user experience with any software they use.

Except for the ridiculous laggy interface, it has some functional bugs as well such as things just disappearing for a few days and then they pop up again

Single core performance has not been stagnant. We're about double where we were in 2015 for a range of workloads. Branch prediction, OoO execution, SIMD, etc. make a huge difference.

The clock speed of a core is important and we are hitting physical limits there, but we're also getting more done with each clock cycle than ever before.

Single core performance has tripled in the last 10 years

I certainly will not die on this hill: my comment was motivated by recently comparing single core scores on Geekbench6 from 10 years apart CPUs.

Care to provide some data?

I don’t think that’s true. AMD’s ****X3D chips are evidence that’s not true, with lots of benchmarks supporting this.

Apple doesn’t really make desktop CPUs, though. Just very good oversized mobile ones.

For AMD/Intel laptop, desktop and server CPUs usually are based on different architectures and don’t have that much overlap.

The author is talking about multi-core performance rather than single core. Apple silicon only offers a low number of cores on desktop chips compared to what Intel or AMD offers. Ampere offers chips than are an order of magnitude faster in multi-core but they are not exactly "desktop" chips. But they are a good data point to say it can be true for ARM if the offer is here.

Just because it doesn't match your situation, doesn't make it a silly argument.

Even though I haven't compiled a Linux kernel for over a decade, I still waste a lot of time compiling. On average, each week I have 5-6 half hour compiles, mostly when I'm forced to change base header files in a massive project.

This is CPU bound for sure - I'm typically using just over half my 64GB RAM and my development drives are on RAIDed NVMe.

I'm still on a Ryzen 7 5800X, because that's what my client specified they wanted me to use 3.5 years ago. Even upgrading to (already 3 years old) 5950X would be a drop-in replacement and double the core count so I'd expect about double the performance (although maybe not quite, as there my be increased memory contention). At current prices for that CPU, that upgrade would pay for itself in terms within 1-2 weeks.

The reason I don't upgrade is policy - my client specified this exact CPU so that my development environment matches their standard setup.

The build farm argument makes sense in an office environment where the majority of developer machines are mostly idle most of the time. It's completely unsuitable for remote working situations where each developer has a single machine and latency and bandwidth to shared resource is slow.

My most cpu intensive task is running the full test suite of a customer's Rails app. I can probably shave off a large percentage of its running time, but it also contains integration tests run with chrome. What I do to shorten the test time is running only the ones of the files that changed. The boot time of Rails is there anyway.

The CI system is still slower that my laptop. We are not really concerned about it.

I'm waiting for something to fail because $3000 on a laptop won't make me gain $3000 from my customer.

Hey, don't call them devs. They are software engineers. They engineer that 8MB javascript page.

You dont run an IDE with indexing, error checking and code completion?

For games its generally not worthwhile since the performance is almost entirely based on gpu these days.

Almost all build guides will say ‘get midrange cpu X over high end chip Y and put the savings to a better GPU’.

Consoles in particular are just a decent gpu with a fairly low end cpu these days. The xbox one with a 1.75Ghz 8core AMD from a couple of generations ago now is still playing all the latest games.

It’s not quite that simple. Often the most expensive chips trade off raw clock speed for more cores, which can be counterproductive if your game only uses 4 threads.

The 8 core X3D chips beat the 16 core ones on almost all games, so that's not that simple.

Beelink GTR9 Pro. It has dual 10G Ethernet interfaces. And get the 128GB RAM version, the RAM is not upgradeable. It isn't quite shipping yet, though.

The absolute best would be a 9005 series Threadripper, but you will easily be pushing $10K+. The mainstream champ is the 9950X but despite being technically a mobile SOC the 395 gets you 90% of the real world performance of a 9950X in a much smaller and power efficient computer:

https://www.phoronix.com/review/amd-ryzen-ai-max-arrow-lake/...

Fastest threadripper on the market is usually a good bet. Worth considering mini-pc on vesa mount / in a cable tray + fast machine in another room.

Also, I've got a gmktec here (cheaper one playing thin client) and it's going to be scrapped in the near future because the monitor connections keep dropping. Framework make a 395 max one, that's tempting as a small single machine.

The computer you listed is specifically designed for running local AI inference, because it has an APU with lots of integrated RAM. If that isn't your use case then AMD 9000 series should be better.

I just bought myself one of these for the same use case https://www.minisforum.uk/products/minisforum-bd770. I did also want to use my existing 3060 GPU, though. It all fit in a relatively small case.

You might be better off buying a mini pc if you’re happy with an integrated GPU. There are plenty of Ryzen mini pcs that end up cheaper than building around an itx motherboard.

Huh, that's a really good deal at 1500 USD for the 64Gb model considering the processor it's running. (It's the same one that's in the Framework desktop that there's been lots of noise about recently - lots of recent reviews on YouTube.)

Get the 128Gb model for (currently) 1999 USD and you can play with running big local LLMs too. The 8060 iGPU is roughly equivalment to a mid-level nVidia laptop GPU, so it's plenty to deal with a normal workload, and some decent gaming or equivalent if needed.

9950x. If you game, get that in X3D version, or a lower-numbered version in X3D.

Multimonitor with 4K tends to need fast GPU just for the bandwidth, else dragging large windows around can feel quite slow (found that out running 3 x 4K monitors on a low-end GPU).

If you want 3x 4k monitors, you need to care how good the GPU is.

I worked on a Spring Boot application that would take more than a minute to start. Not Spring's fault, IIUC, but nevertheless a focus killer.

Hah, I find your setup crazy! I don't need or want that much stuff. To me it would get in the way, and increase my maintenance burden.

I also like having things Just So; and keeping windows and browser tabs and terminals etc. all in the same place on several different machines would drive me nuts.

I have one 3:2 aspect ratio 13" laptop, and I do everything on it. My wife had two large external screens for work that she doesn't use anymore, but I never use them. I like the simplicity of staring at one single rectangle, and not having extraneous stuff around me.

> There are a lot of jobs that should run in a home server running 24/7 instead of abusing your poor laptop.

Not sure I buy that. My laptop has 20 cores and 64GB of RAM, and sure, maybe a full build from scratch will peg all those cores, but for incremental builds (the 99% case), single core perf is what really matters, and a home server isn't going to give me meaningful gains over my laptop there.

And my laptop can very easily handle the "strain" of my code editor with whatever developer-assistance features I've set up.

Sure, CI jobs run elsewhere, but I don't need a home server for that; the VPS that hosts the git repository is fine.

I dunno, alt+tab works as fast for me as moving my head to look at another monitor.

And I'm not particularly concerned with "abusing" my laptop. I paid for its chips and all of its cores, I'm not going to not use them...

I was away from my regular desktop dev PC for multiple months recently and only used a crappy laptop for dev work. I got used to it pretty quickly.

This makes me remember so many years ago starting to program on a dual core plastic MacBook.

Also, I’m very impressed by one of my coworkers working on 13 inch laptop only. Extremely smart. A bigger guy so I worry about his posture and RSI on such a small laptop.

TLDR I think more screen space does not scale near linearly with productivity

> I've seen more and more companies embrace cloud workstations.

In which movie ? "Microsoft fried movie" ? Cloud sucks big time. Not all engineers are web developers.

Great, now every operation has 300ms of latency. Kill me

It is true, but also funny to think back on how slow computers used to be. Even the run-of-the-mill cheap machines today are like a million times faster than supercomputers from the 70s and 80s. We’ve always had the issue that we have to wait for our computers, even though for desktop personal computers there has been a speedup of like seven or eight orders of magnitude over the last 50 years. It could be better, but that has always been true. The things we ask computers to do grows as fast as the hardware speeds up. Why?

So, in a way, slow computers is always a software problem, not a hardware problem. If we always wrote software to be as performant as possible, and if we only ran things that were within the capability of the machine, we’d never have to wait. But we don’t do that; good optimization takes a lot of developer time, and being willing to wait a few minutes nets me computations that are a couple orders of magnitude larger than what it can do in real time.

To be fair, things have improved on average. Wait times are reduced for most things. Not as fast as hardware has sped up, but it is getting better over time.

Yeah. I would say, do get a better CPU, but do also research a bit deeper and really get a better CPU. Threadrippers are borderline workstation, too, though, esp. the pro SKUs.

They have good performance, especially per watt, for a laptop.

Certainly not ahead of the curve when considering server hardware.

In my experience comments like these are generally made by people who dont have much experience outside of using laptops.

Funny thing we just talked about this in a thread 2 days ago. Comments like this leads me to dismiss anything coming from apple fan boys.

It's not like objective benchmarks disproving these sort of statements don't exist.