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Comment by sdrinf | Hacker News Reader

Use case: Due to moving countries, I've recently dumped my powerhouse desktop ( http://blog.codinghorror.com/building-a-pc-part-vii-rebootin... ), and am laptoping around various places; a lifestyle I will probably continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

There are few, if any, performant laptops, that could get even close to the sort of performance I've used to using that machine. However, as long as deployment time is <~3 minutes, I don't necessarily need it to be a laptop; but can settle a middle road in some variations of these.

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If a laptop isn't fast enough, a NUC wouldn't be either. The NUC is an ultrabook in a small desktop form factor - the "Core i7" branding you see means less than the "U" at the end of the CPU part number (which means that the CPU is a low-power part).

If you need a portable powerhouse laptop, you need a 15" MacBook Pro. Mine is a quad-core with 16GB of RAM and it's by far the fastest laptop I've ever seen. It's not a great gaming machine simply because of the lack of games; though more and more games are seeing Mac ports than ever since 4 of the 5 major game development engines support Mac (and it's hard to justify support for SteamOS if you don't support Mac as well). It's not cheap; but between price, portability and power you can only pick two.

That's not true.

It depends a lot on the OS and what you're doing. If you're using Ubuntu, the NUC would be faster for most tasks because the intel graphics card has nice drivers and the (integrated) graphics card is faster. So flash videos would run much better. Also, per core, the NUC is roughly just as fast. Maybe a little faster. Most of the time you are not using all cores.

Here's the CPU comparison between this NUC and the fastest Macbook Pro CPU http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Core-i7-5557U-vs-Intel-Core-i7...

Finally, both NUC and Macbook Pro are really bad with games. Macbook Pro heats up like crazy even when sitting on an aluminum cooler just watching Netflix. Playing games is another story. Very few are supported and even fewer are optimized for OSX. On the other hand, the NUC just doesn't have the discrete graphics card required.

If you are OK with the form factor and aren't running multicore simulation most of the time, the NUC is a better choice.

Like you, when first moving from desktop to notebook I found them lacking everywhere. Overy the years, I became so used to the mobility* that I can't think of going back. Also, your electricity bill will show a difference (most notebooks use arround 65W to 80W vs 250W to 600W for a desktop!).

* even though these days I don't travel as much as I used to

> 65W to 80W vs 250W to 600W

Are you citing the power supplies ratings instead of actual power consumption?

When gaming my modestly configured desktop (i5, GTX650 ti, ssd/hdd combo w/good air cooling and good case cooling) pulls 250-300 "at the wall" according to my kill-a-watt. I would imagine that as you go up the "gaming" chain (multiple GPUs, water cooling, etc) you could find yourself at the upper bound of that range.

A laptop wouldn't match that performance though. And when not gaming the wattage should be a bit lower.

What are you doing that a specced up http://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/notebooks/optimusV-17/ couldn't handle?

Chrome.exe ,no, srsly.

Specifically, when doing deep infodiving, it's not uncommon to juggle (that is, actually apply ops within 30-min intervals to) 80+ tabs; 2 visual studio in the background; local number crunching: large-ish data / machine learning sandboxes; one-click virtual-machines ("wonder how this looks like in a mac?"); and the occasional steam round. 2x4 vCPU cores usually humming along at ~10-40%, 20-something GB ram usage, no swap.

These reqs bias me towards performance, even at _some_ expense of mobility.

Why not a remote setup? I have a high performance workstation that lives in my office- dual 12-core Xeons, 256GB RAM, Tesla etc.

I have a dirt cheap Lenovo laptop (~$300 + an SSD) running OpenBSD that I use to connect over OpenVPN + SSH for doing any serious computation. You'd probably want something with a higher-res display and Windows-based, but if it's possible that sort of setup might be easier.

I long ago gave up on "workstation class" laptops. You just don't get enough bang for the buck IMO.

Incidentally, if you're buying small-scale HPC hardware I highly recommend ThinkMate. Their prices are far far better than Dell/IBM/etc. and their support has always been superb.

What about the network latency? It doesn't bother you?

Most of the stuff I do on the remote side is in the shell and Mosh helps alleviate most of that so I generally don't have a problem with latency. For gui stuff I either run it locally or I use things that are client-server oriented (like ParaView). Last resort is to use X2go, which is really phenomenal remote desktop software with great performance, but Linux only AFAIK.

Might not work for everybody, but something worth considering. For me, the trade off versus lugging around one of those monstrous "portable workstations" compared to my dinky little plastic Lenovo is well worth it.

From my perspective, Chrome is magical in terms of resource usage. You get a task manager to kill off tabs that use ridiculous amounts of CPU for when you aren't even looking at them, and all it takes is a simple refresh to bring them back. Compared to Firefox on Ubuntu on my cheap modern laptop, I can run an immensely larger number of tabs in Chrome with less CPU load, and bring them up very quickly. It seems like it is definitely doing a lot more GPU caching, as I have encountered a lot of weird graphical effects clicking to tabs that I haven't been using, especially when restoring a large session (I've been using Chromium lately).

As far as the virtual machines go, you could potentially just remote for those, no? Honestly I would prefer a laptop running on a very low load, especially if it's in my lap!

It might be nice to try a setup comprising one of these little NUC things, a monitor (or two) which won't break when travelling (e.g. Lenovo LT1421), a tenkeyless keyboard and proper mouse.

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