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Comment by majika | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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

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