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I just recently completed a build myself. It was pre-Ryzen so AMD wasn't an option at the time. I went with the Intel i7-7700 (quad core) at 3.6 GHz. I was sur

by nxc18 10y ago

I just recently completed a build myself. It was pre-Ryzen so AMD wasn't an option at the time. I went with the Intel i7-7700 (quad core) at 3.6 GHz. I was surprised by two big things: high-performance devices are extremely affordable nowadays and processors have gotten a lot better despite minimal changes in clock speed. I went on PC Part Picker and built my 'budget' device and my 'fantasy' device. It turned out they were just about the same. I couldn't really spend more than $1500 for anything better without jumping to server-grade parts. Yesterday I played Halo Wars 2, listened to Spotify, kept Word, Excel, Edge, Chrome, & WEKA open, and was running an embarrassingly inefficient data mining program in Python via WSL, while running a Jenkins build server in an Ubuntu Server VM, and running TeamCity in a Windows Server VM. Even on the Intel chip, which is presumably less good at multitasking than Ryzen, I just can't throw enough at it to experience anything resembling slowdown. 8 logical cores still seems to be plenty for most users, but I could see with even more VMs that one might need more. As an aside, it is incredibly nice to be able to run VMs without even thinking about their resource consumption - it's like having my own little cloud. I wonder if maybe Intel's marketing for their chips could use improvement. On paper, my MacBook Pro with 16Gb RAM and 3GHz i7 shouldn't be that much worse than my desktop with 32Gb RAM (most of which is unused) and 3.6GHz i7. The difference in practice is night and day. I'm losing faith in the concept of a laptop as a developer's primary device (especially with SSH & Remote Desktop being so good these days).

givemefive 10y ago
Look at synthetic benchmarks of your chip and the MBP. It's night and day difference. I won't use a laptop to develop on either. It's too slow. (And the ergonomics are terrible anyways so a monitor, keyboard, mouse, etc are all necessary anyways)
mastazi 10y ago
Just like you, I completed my build recently. Before that, for a few years I had used laptops exclusively. I was blown away by how even a modest desktop [1] is so much faster than even a high end laptop [2]. I believe it's because any laptop will end up throttling because of thermals, unless you get one of those very heavy gaming or workstation laptops with huge cooling systems. Oh and I had to throw away my laptop because the motherboard failed, all I could salvage was the SSD. Not going to happen with a desktop. [1] (I have a non-overclockable i5-6500, 16GB DDR4, SSD with SATA3 interface, a GTX 1060 with 6GB VRAM) [2] My laptop was an i7 quad-core, 16GB DDR4, SSD SATA3, GT840 GPU. Everything except the GPU was better than or equal to my desktop.
- codinghorror 10y ago
  The watt budget of a laptop is prohibitive. The watt budget gloves only come off with a desktop.
  - copperx 10y ago
    It's a shame that 2/3rds of Apple's desktop offerings are constrained by that watt budget. iMacs and Mac Minis run on laptop-grade hardware, as I understand.
    - Recurecur 10y ago
      iMacs run desktop CPUs, but mobile GPUs (which are still pretty fast, but not the fastest). Apple REALLY needs to come out with a mini-tower Mac supporting desktop graphics cards. And no, I don't mean the new Mac Pro.
      - stuaxo 9y ago
        They could bring back the cube form factor.
      - chaostheory 9y ago
        Yeah it would be nice to have a headless iMac that you can upgrade that doesn't have server grade components. Right now I'm pessimistic about even the new Mac Pros being upgradable looking at the current iMacs and Macbook Pros.
  - artursapek 9y ago
    I never thought about this. Do laptops perform better when plugged in?
    - andy_ppp 9y ago
      Yes but it becomes really noticeable (for me at least) when you get down the the final 5-10% of battery life.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
xuejie 10y ago
I couldn't agree with you more, I believe these days a developer can gain more with a Chromebook for portability, and a powerful desktop/cloud VM for the beefy tasks. You could end up paying the same (or even less) as a high end laptop, but you could gain more power and benefits this way.
vel0city 10y ago
I've been living the cheap-but-decent portable + big desktop in my personal life for several years now. Between RDP and SSH, I can do practically everything from my laptop with a decent internet connection aside from gaming. Plus, many of those cheap-but-decent laptops get some great battery life, especially if you're offloading the heavy compute onto a different box. I still drool over getting a sweet $2k+ ultraportable laptop though. I'll let my office buy those things for that work and stick to the cheaper personal life. Portable devices just can't seem to live with the chaos of life, and I'd rather break a $400-500 machine than a $2k machine.
- pawadu 10y ago
  I am doing the same [1], SSH and tmux are my best friends. I did however try the expensive-powerful-laptop first [2], it wasn't worth it and my current desktop beats it in everything but gaming. [1] $350 DIY PC + a $250 second hand thinkpad [2] $2200 laptop with the latest i7 and discerete GPU.
- rjbwork 9y ago
  I don't have an "ultra portable" but I have a $2500 desktop replacement for work. It's got a 970m and a 6700K. Yes, that's a desktop chip, and it hits 4.2GHz nicely when needed. I mostly just tote it to the office and home, so it's quite nice.
outworlder 10y ago
> On paper, my MacBook Pro with 16Gb RAM and 3GHz i7 shouldn't be that much worse than my desktop with 32Gb RAM (most of which is unused) and 3.6GHz i7. It is much worse. Remember that the laptop i7 is a much lower power part.
jrockway 10y ago
My impression is that Moore's law is totally dead and CPUs have not changed in any meaningful way in 4 years. My old i7-4771 feels just as fast as my new i7-6950x. The 10 cores are nice when you need 10 cores though.
- ryan-allen 10y ago
  My 3370 i7 still is 'good enough' like, 4 years later. I'm itching to upgrade the CPU/RAM/Mobo but I can't really justify it. The nice thing is, I can throw a new GTX and a PCIe SSD in and that'll have quite a bit of benefit. Custom PCs are awesome!
- tormeh 10y ago
  I have an FX 8350, and I really want to upgrade. Performance per core of the newest processors are approaching 2x of mine. Trouble is, except for Civilization, no game actually needs a faster processor. It's really hard to justify. Processors just last a really long time these days.
  - distances 9y ago
    Cities: Skylines with large cities benefits very much of a higher core count, as the citizen/vehicle simulation parallelizes nicely. No experience how well it behaves with Ryzen though, but at least it is utilizing all cores on my trusty old Sandy Bridge i7.
    - tormeh 9y ago
      The 8350 has no shortage of cores, at least as long as there's little floating point calculus going in.
  - ajacksified 9y ago
    I dunno, I just spent a couple thousand on a Dwarf Fortress machine. It's still single threaded :(
- ioulian 10y ago
agumonkey 10y ago
As a side note, I saw someone on facebook sniping a dell m905 blade in some NY depot for less than a 100$ the thing came with 4 AMD cpus and loads of ram (maybe 64GB). It's neither recent or pristine, but having a slim 4C/64GB thing at that price is worth considering.. no more rpi clusters :p
- dom0 10y ago
  > dell m905 ... 100$ These are really old, Socket F, DDR2 blades. Given that the corresponding blade center will be needed as well, probably not that good a deal.
  - agumonkey 10y ago
    Alright, and what about more recent blades around 500$ ?
    - dom0 9y ago
      I considered blades but at least for me I concluded they were a bad fit: - The centers are large and heavy, needs a fair amount of space, can't really be handled alone. Also means they're shipped on a pallet, which is somewhat expensive. - Blades are less common overall compared to servers - Blades have more peculiar I/O than normal servers, you can't just stick an IB card or GPU in there - The backend I/O modules are fairly rare 2nd hand, so either you find a center which has the modules you want or you're SOL
      - agumonkey 9y ago
        Fair points
      - mech422 9y ago
        I have both HP g6 blades and Dell C6100 blades at home...you can get both for about $200/node with 2xquad core and 24G of Ram. The only real issues with them are the NOISE and the electric usage. 16 nodes sounds like your living in an airport. The HP is 8 nodes with a shipping weight of 300 pounds. Cost $350 for shipping, IIRC - pop the sleds and the heaviest part is probably ~25 pounds, easy to handle without help. The HP blades also came with mellonox 10G cards.
heeen2 9y ago
My i7 2600k is getting a bit long in the tooth, but I can get it to sweat by compiling yocto poky. Especially building Webkit/Chromium and Qt eats memory and cores like nothing.
- derptron 9y ago
  All it takes to choke my i5-2500 to death is running Battlefield 1

by nxc18 10y ago

givemefive 10y ago

Look at synthetic benchmarks of your chip and the MBP. It's night and day difference. I won't use a laptop to develop on either. It's too slow. (And the ergonomics are terrible anyways so a monitor, keyboard, mouse, etc are all necessary anyways)

mastazi 10y ago

Just like you, I completed my build recently. Before that, for a few years I had used laptops exclusively. I was blown away by how even a modest desktop [1] is so much faster than even a high end laptop [2]. I believe it's because any laptop will end up throttling because of thermals, unless you get one of those very heavy gaming or workstation laptops with huge cooling systems. Oh and I had to throw away my laptop because the motherboard failed, all I could salvage was the SSD. Not going to happen with a desktop. [1] (I have a non-overclockable i5-6500, 16GB DDR4, SSD with SATA3 interface, a GTX 1060 with 6GB VRAM) [2] My laptop was an i7 quad-core, 16GB DDR4, SSD SATA3, GT840 GPU. Everything except the GPU was better than or equal to my desktop.

codinghorror 10y ago
The watt budget of a laptop is prohibitive. The watt budget gloves only come off with a desktop.
- copperx 10y ago
  It's a shame that 2/3rds of Apple's desktop offerings are constrained by that watt budget. iMacs and Mac Minis run on laptop-grade hardware, as I understand.
  - Recurecur 10y ago
    iMacs run desktop CPUs, but mobile GPUs (which are still pretty fast, but not the fastest). Apple REALLY needs to come out with a mini-tower Mac supporting desktop graphics cards. And no, I don't mean the new Mac Pro.
    - stuaxo 9y ago
      They could bring back the cube form factor.
    - chaostheory 9y ago
      Yeah it would be nice to have a headless iMac that you can upgrade that doesn't have server grade components. Right now I'm pessimistic about even the new Mac Pros being upgradable looking at the current iMacs and Macbook Pros.
- artursapek 9y ago
  I never thought about this. Do laptops perform better when plugged in?
  - andy_ppp 9y ago
    Yes but it becomes really noticeable (for me at least) when you get down the the final 5-10% of battery life.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

xuejie 10y ago

I couldn't agree with you more, I believe these days a developer can gain more with a Chromebook for portability, and a powerful desktop/cloud VM for the beefy tasks. You could end up paying the same (or even less) as a high end laptop, but you could gain more power and benefits this way.

vel0city 10y ago

I've been living the cheap-but-decent portable + big desktop in my personal life for several years now. Between RDP and SSH, I can do practically everything from my laptop with a decent internet connection aside from gaming. Plus, many of those cheap-but-decent laptops get some great battery life, especially if you're offloading the heavy compute onto a different box. I still drool over getting a sweet $2k+ ultraportable laptop though. I'll let my office buy those things for that work and stick to the cheaper personal life. Portable devices just can't seem to live with the chaos of life, and I'd rather break a $400-500 machine than a $2k machine.

pawadu 10y ago
I am doing the same [1], SSH and tmux are my best friends. I did however try the expensive-powerful-laptop first [2], it wasn't worth it and my current desktop beats it in everything but gaming. [1] $350 DIY PC + a $250 second hand thinkpad [2] $2200 laptop with the latest i7 and discerete GPU.
rjbwork 9y ago
I don't have an "ultra portable" but I have a $2500 desktop replacement for work. It's got a 970m and a 6700K. Yes, that's a desktop chip, and it hits 4.2GHz nicely when needed. I mostly just tote it to the office and home, so it's quite nice.

outworlder 10y ago

> On paper, my MacBook Pro with 16Gb RAM and 3GHz i7 shouldn't be that much worse than my desktop with 32Gb RAM (most of which is unused) and 3.6GHz i7. It is much worse. Remember that the laptop i7 is a much lower power part.

jrockway 10y ago

My impression is that Moore's law is totally dead and CPUs have not changed in any meaningful way in 4 years. My old i7-4771 feels just as fast as my new i7-6950x. The 10 cores are nice when you need 10 cores though.

ryan-allen 10y ago
My 3370 i7 still is 'good enough' like, 4 years later. I'm itching to upgrade the CPU/RAM/Mobo but I can't really justify it. The nice thing is, I can throw a new GTX and a PCIe SSD in and that'll have quite a bit of benefit. Custom PCs are awesome!
tormeh 10y ago
I have an FX 8350, and I really want to upgrade. Performance per core of the newest processors are approaching 2x of mine. Trouble is, except for Civilization, no game actually needs a faster processor. It's really hard to justify. Processors just last a really long time these days.
- distances 9y ago
  Cities: Skylines with large cities benefits very much of a higher core count, as the citizen/vehicle simulation parallelizes nicely. No experience how well it behaves with Ryzen though, but at least it is utilizing all cores on my trusty old Sandy Bridge i7.
  - tormeh 9y ago
    The 8350 has no shortage of cores, at least as long as there's little floating point calculus going in.
- ajacksified 9y ago
  I dunno, I just spent a couple thousand on a Dwarf Fortress machine. It's still single threaded :(
ioulian 10y ago

agumonkey 10y ago

As a side note, I saw someone on facebook sniping a dell m905 blade in some NY depot for less than a 100$ the thing came with 4 AMD cpus and loads of ram (maybe 64GB). It's neither recent or pristine, but having a slim 4C/64GB thing at that price is worth considering.. no more rpi clusters :p

dom0 10y ago
> dell m905 ... 100$ These are really old, Socket F, DDR2 blades. Given that the corresponding blade center will be needed as well, probably not that good a deal.
- agumonkey 10y ago
  Alright, and what about more recent blades around 500$ ?
  - dom0 9y ago
    I considered blades but at least for me I concluded they were a bad fit: - The centers are large and heavy, needs a fair amount of space, can't really be handled alone. Also means they're shipped on a pallet, which is somewhat expensive. - Blades are less common overall compared to servers - Blades have more peculiar I/O than normal servers, you can't just stick an IB card or GPU in there - The backend I/O modules are fairly rare 2nd hand, so either you find a center which has the modules you want or you're SOL
    - agumonkey 9y ago
      Fair points
    - mech422 9y ago
      I have both HP g6 blades and Dell C6100 blades at home...you can get both for about $200/node with 2xquad core and 24G of Ram. The only real issues with them are the NOISE and the electric usage. 16 nodes sounds like your living in an airport. The HP is 8 nodes with a shipping weight of 300 pounds. Cost $350 for shipping, IIRC - pop the sleds and the heaviest part is probably ~25 pounds, easy to handle without help. The HP blades also came with mellonox 10G cards.

heeen2 9y ago

My i7 2600k is getting a bit long in the tooth, but I can get it to sweat by compiling yocto poky. Especially building Webkit/Chromium and Qt eats memory and cores like nothing.

derptron 9y ago
All it takes to choke my i5-2500 to death is running Battlefield 1