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Comment by ozten | Hacker News Reader

I've been looking for a new laptop that will build Firefox or FirefoxOS in a reasonable amount of time. Macbook Pros, AFAICT are the only game in town. (Would love to be wrong here)

Perhaps in this alternate universe... Sony, Lenovo and others are producing reasonable high-end laptops.

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I'm pretty sure the top-end Dell Precision mobile workstations have more computing power than the top-end Macbook pros, for instance. The same is probably true for the HP Elitebooks.

They may not be as light, though.

Yep if you're willing to trade weight you can easily get a core i7-3840QM which can do 8 threads (4 cores) fairly fast. My current one I've been able to emulate some of the last gen consoles even for fun, compiling Firefox or Firefox OS is largely going to be an issue of disk speed which is fixable with either gobs of ram or and SSD, (preferably both, though overprices the alienware m18x r2 will take multiple drives, an msata ssd, and 32gb of ram and can be upgraded to workstation graphics cards if you have the cash).

Disk i/o is not the bottleneck when compiling an OS.

When i was last using gentoo (which admittidly was a while ago) it was pretty much the bottle neck for most things if you wanted to compile in parallel, largely because intermediate steps are written out to the disk before linking and less so because of reading. That said it is possible to do it all in memory but then you end up memory bound which is also possible to work around by throwing money at your ram (or downloading more off the web).

Could you elaborate on that? I would assume that most compiler steps are linear traversals of graphs and the time comes from lots of small IOs.

If you're looking at an i7 anyway, I'd strongly consider a laptop based on the i7-4950hq with the newest on-board graphics.

Not a bad idea, all of mine is speced from about 1.5 years ago before haswell was publicly available. So while a little dated, certainly more than enough to do pretty much most of what someone wants.

You'd also have to go for the 4800MQ CPU to get rMBP 15" performance. You'd be paying $2700 for a 7.8 lbs machine. Why wouldn't you get the Mac?

$1600 actually, I have no idea where you pulled that $2700 number from.

http://configure.us.dell.com/dellstore/config.aspx?oc=smp480...

Out of curiosity, what about the Dell Precision M3800 (starting at 4.15 lbs)? At first glance, the specs look pretty comparable to the current Retina MacBook Pro.

What makes the Macbook Pros exclusively fast at building Firefox?

Perhaps it's just that the build process for OS X has been optimized more than other platforms. This would be expected, given that most Mozilla developers seem to be Mac users (bah to non-free software I say).

If that's the case, someone's got to make the jump, right? I assume Firefox/Phoenix/Netscape built quicker on Windows once upon a time.

> What makes the Macbook Pros exclusively fast at building Firefox?

I think the Retina MBPs are the only laptops so far that use PCIe SSDs, so they're not limited by SATA's 6Gbps.

> > What makes the Macbook Pros exclusively fast at building Firefox?

> I think the Retina MBPs are the only laptops so far that use PCIe SSDs, so they're not limited by SATA's 6Gbps.

If the bottleneck in your build process is the data transfer speed from your hard drive, props to you.

Well, it doesn't have to be a severe bottleneck in order for faster storage to be an advantage. If you've got two laptops with the same CPU and amount and speed of RAM, but one has a 30% faster SSD, then the latter will do a better job of keeping the CPU fully loaded.

Unless the 30% slower SSD can keep the CPU fully loaded since it's not the bottleneck.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPU_bound>

some models of the vaio pro come with a pcie based ssd. i don't think they're that rare

I use a Lenovo W530, but it's quite hefty.

I've got a thinkpad w530 too. It's a beast, definitely outperforms my Macbook pro. Not really a fair comparison though, totally different weight class :)

The VAIO Z used to fill those requirements. Looks like the VAIO Pro replacement for the Z now has all ULV processors. :(

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