6 ms·

Tangential anecdote. I would love to upgrade my personal intel MacBook. Unfortunately (mebe) I found a killer deal on a 5950x last year and now I’ve got a bea

by lgkk 3y ago

Tangential anecdote. I would love to upgrade my personal intel MacBook. Unfortunately (mebe) I found a killer deal on a 5950x last year and now I’ve got a beast of a workstation with 128gb ram. I have actually found it hard to use my laptop anymore. Work laptop is a M1 with 64gb ram. It’s fast. But my workstation feels a lot more powerful. It’s hard to use either laptops and dealing with spinners and waiting. Anyone else in the same boat?

6d65 3y ago
I have been tracking 5950x prices and anything over $300 seems unreasonable. And I think I'm just going to get a 7700x and a new MB and 32GB of RAM, it should be a $500-sh upgrade. It should have M3 like single threaded perf, multi threaded perf better than 5950x, slightly worse than M3 Max, better memory bandwidth than the 5950x. You're right about just having a beefier PC, but maybe a baseline M2/M3 Air to SSH into a local machine + a beefier PC is a good combination. Luckly I switched to an all in terminal dev experience with Neovim/Helix/Tmux and the advantage is that one can seamlessly mix ssh/mosh shells in this workflow. Don't even need to set up any VNC/RDPs/Moonlights. Maybe even that is not needed if your languages supports ccache like tools. I'm mostly interested in compilation speed, maybe running some programs faster on beefier hardware and I don't mind working on Linux. So to recap, a baseline Air for portability(or some light ryzen laptop) plus a medium range PC seems like a winning combination for me. Given you already have a case/psu/ssd together they can cost as an entry level m3 macbook pro with 8GB of RAM.
gtirloni 3y ago
Not really. What workloads are you running that you experience waiting on a M1 with 64GB?
klohto 3y ago
wtf, you’re comparing 800W with 20W machine. No shit your workstation is more powerful, it’s a fucking workstation not a battery operated laptop. If you are troubled by loading on 64GB M1 Max, then congrats, you are doing workload that no laptop will handle.
- rfoo 3y ago
  > If you are troubled by loading on 64GB M1 Max, then congrats, you are doing workload that no laptop will handle. I can easily buy a laptop with 128GB RAM, eats more energy (100W+) and is more powerful. It's just that it does not have an Apple logo on it. Does it not count as a laptop?
  - threeseed 3y ago
    > Does it not count as a laptop If it's drawing 100W then the poor battery life make it more like a semi-portable. Also given what we know about male fertility I wouldn't have that anywhere near my lap.
  - audunw 3y ago
    > Does it not count as a laptop? In the literal sense? No. I don’t feel like those kinds of laptops are comfortable on my lap. To be a bit more serious, yeah sure they are laptops, but you tend to sacrifice portability, battery life and comfort. Which for most people are pretty important metrics for a laptop. “Luggable” is a term sometimes used about this class of products. I’m sure the poster was being hyperbolic. Of course you can find laptops with more RAM and some use cases that 64GB wouldn’t cover. But for most common tasks it’s more than enough.
    - happymellon 3y ago
      > In the literal sense? No. I don’t feel like those kinds of laptops are comfortable on my lap. Then in my experience, Apple did not make a pro laptop for a very long time until the M series came along. I remember my MacBook Pro from 2009 getting hot enough to hurt my legs, let alone any from the following decade that ran hotter.
- lern_too_spel 3y ago
  The M1 Max MacBook Pro is not a 20W machine. It will happily use 100 W if the CPU and GPU are in use. https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performance-review/3 https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc...
omnimus 3y ago
What are you even doing? I have refurbished workstation from 2016 (xeon with 32gig ram for 200usd) and the cheapest M1 air. And i am sitting here thinking we went past of what people need for personal/work computer because i can easily do my work on it and would get nothing from faster machines. Yes i dont compile big codebases (where i assume it done outside of my system anyway) but i just wonder what are the HW companies going to do to keep people upgrading their machines.
- axelthegerman 3y ago
  > but i just wonder what are the HW companies going to do to keep people upgrading their machines Easy, just drop software support for it and force you to buy a new one... Or switch to Linux
  - omnimus 3y ago
    Tihis seems to be the way. Like even Windows is dropping older HW. At the same time it looks like great thing for Linux
- broeng 3y ago
  We'll find a way to use up what they can provide :-) With 64GB ram and our infrastructure defined with NixOS, I find myself building and spinning it up locally (in test mode) as part of working on it. Having ~10 VMs running locally with 2-3 GB of ram each quickly adds up. It feels a little dirty, but it's really nice to have the possibility. :-)
- mixermachine 3y ago
  I switched from an i7 1065g7, 32GB RAM to an M2 Pro (10 CPU cores), 32GB RAM. It makes a huge difference to me. Android Studio and Gradle builds are running a lot faster now. Before about 2-3 minutes, now less than a minute. My company builds an Android SDK for payments. For me the end is not reached and I'm looking forward to an upgrade in 3-5 years.
  - omnimus 3y ago
satvikpendem 3y ago
Yes, I have an M1 Macbook Pro that I rarely use as I have a similar AMD-powered desktop machine as yours, and I'm usually at my desk anyway when working, so I simply don't use the laptop unless I need to travel. I'm looking to upgrade to the Threadrippers [0] next year however and get even more of a speed advantage. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37942418 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37942418
speedgoose 3y ago
Do you need that amount of memory on your laptop? My work M1 laptop has only 16gb of ram. If I need more ram I have access to many servers and use my laptop as a SSH console, a jupyter, or a VSCode client. The servers have up to 6TB of ram each, but I mostly use one with 512GB. I see that you can now order machines with 32TB of ram, like this one: https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/system/mp/6u/sys-681e-tr https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/system/mp/6u/sys-681e...
- dboreham 3y ago
  Not parent but we find that 16G macbooks are a bit chintzy for running container builds of particularly Rust projects.
- faeriechangling 3y ago
  When the M series laptops came out I thought that it made sense to be economical with memory, but LLM's became huge a few years after release and Apple Silicon happens to be local inferencing beasts that can use all the memory you can throw at it. At release I would have said most people should stick with as little memory as they could get away with due to Apple's pricing and the non-upgradability. Nowadays, I'd either recommend the M3 or M3 Pro and keeping things cheaper, but if you're going to get the Max at all, I sort of feel like you may as well go for the 16c cpu/40c GPU/128gb option at $1500 USD more and play around with stuff like Laama. It will become obsolete in not too long due to memory tech marching forwards, but it's still going to be plenty capable of dabbling with this stuff for awhile. The M3 Max has the memory bandwidth of a 4 dimm DDR5-6400 server which is pretty impressive given the pricing. Beyond that, I see people speccing high memory for things like VFX and Macs are pretty popular choices for those doing video work.
csomar 3y ago
Of course, a desktop is always going to be more performant. Especially if you have special cooling around.
lvncelot 3y ago
I have a workstation with a 3950x and 128gigs ram that I mostly use for fluid sims in Houdini and rendering tasks. There's honestly nothing that I'm doing on my work machine (an M2 macbook pro) that I feel would benefit from more cores or more RAM - really compute-intensive stuff gets offloaded to a server anyways. The only real difference I'm noticing is that emacs for some reason is just slower on osx than on linux, but that's not down to the raw performance, as even my 7 old Thinkpad with a 4-core i5 makes emacs feel way snappier than my macbook.
- aeonik 3y ago
  Have you native compiled Emacs? brew install emacs-plus@29 --with-native-comp I have a 5950x when 128GB of RAM, and an M1 Max. I was performance testing some Clojure code a few days ago (pure number crunching in parallel), and I was shocked to see it running faster in every test case on my M1 Mac. I think it might have more to do with memory bandwidth and thermals than the processing speed and cores.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
throw932490 3y ago
I gave up on carrying laptops. I travel between three locations, just with my phone and NVMe disk. All three locations have identical setup: monitors, workstation, desk, chair... Computer for me is a just docking station for a harddrive. I really hated dealing with USB dongles, power suspend and all that stuff. If I have to work on the go, I have bluetooth keyboard for my phone.
flohofwoe 3y ago
I'm in the other boat, but it's also not great for Apple. My min-spec 2021 14" MBP is so much overkill for the stuff I'm doing (C/C++ coding) that I probably won't need a faster one for a decade or so ;)
reimertz 3y ago
Ever considered Open Core? It works quite well, even for AMD CPUs. I happen to have the same CPU as you and been running my Hackintosh setup smoothly for 1.5 years. You can see my setup and full open core configuration here; https://github.com/reimertz/hackintosh-x570i-5950x-6800xt https://github.com/reimertz/hackintosh-x570i-5950x-6800xt The only caveat is intel-only cpu instructions that might cause certain apps to not work. The adobe suite is one example.
Unfrozen0688 3y ago
I mean yes? As someone with a gaming computer, I never understood devs that use a laptop... its way slower, waaaaaaay worse cooling = more noise and less expansion possible in terms of RAM, storage and ports.
- faeriechangling 3y ago
  Apple silicon is either totally silent, or totally silent/very quiet at idle (depending on settings) and not that loud at load. Apple is using the most power efficient chips on the planet and exhaustively optimised cooling solutions that use the aluminium case as a heatsink. I've tried to make an ATX gaming build silent, it never worked out satisfactorily after a lot of time and expense. I've done the silent gaming build and Apple Silicon and I cannot recommend Apple silicon enough. I spent many hours researching, building, and tweaking a computer buying premium components and at the end of the day the computer ended up being louder and less performant than the Mac I took out of the box and plugged into the wall. Even if I built that silent gaming PC perfectly, which is a big "if", the two big problems are that ATX gaming PCs are poorly designed for the passive cooling performance of the CPU/GPU/PSU, and that the lower performance/watt means that your gaming PC will likely have more coil whine for the same level of performance. Three is that the GOOD silent Intel/AMD machines are NOT gaming PCs, they're low powered PCs sold on aliexpress with a custom case that acts as a heatsink that are much cheaper than anything Apple sells. In terms of less expansion: - No expandable storage sucks, but it's also not a HUGE deal when 1TB is realistically going to be enough local storage for 90% of devs for the lifespan of the computer. - No expandable memory sucks, but you know what else sucks? Gaming desktops using dual channel memory running at maybe 100gb/s with the GPU choked off from accessing it by the PCIe bus. The price you pay to get a pooled 128gb memory the GPU/CPU can use at 400gb/s bandwidth from Apple is actually insanely low compared to the competition. - For ports, Apple is running three TB4 connectors and an HDMI 2.1 port with 168gb/s combined bandwidth with Wifi 6E/BT 5.3. Sure having lots of USB 3.0 ports is cool, but what else is cool is being able to have multiple laptops and setting up a desk which allows any of your laptops to connect to every peripheral via a single cable. - Finally, Apple Silicon holds its resale value, so selling your current model and buying a different one if needed is really not THAT big of a deal.
stephen_g 3y ago
Nah... Work laptop is a M2 Pro, 32GB ram. I need the form factor because I travel internationally with it, but it feels as fast as or faster than any other machine I have ever used...
norwalkbear 3y ago
Yes absolutely
faeriechangling 3y ago
Powerful how? M1 Max has like 8x the memory bandwidth of a 5950x running 4 sticks of memory. 5950x has more compute, and in practice compute heavy tasks are more optimised for the platform, but I don't actually find myself exploiting that all that often since I'm not a Linux Kernel compilation enthusiast. M3 Max is better than 5950x maybe 90-95% of the time and its shored up its weaknesses in raw compute horsepower. That being said, I'm getting more interested in a workstation myself because the M-series has stagnated in terms of memory bandwidth and a couple of used 3090's are pretty cheap.

by lgkk 3y ago

6d65 3y ago

I have been tracking 5950x prices and anything over $300 seems unreasonable. And I think I'm just going to get a 7700x and a new MB and 32GB of RAM, it should be a $500-sh upgrade. It should have M3 like single threaded perf, multi threaded perf better than 5950x, slightly worse than M3 Max, better memory bandwidth than the 5950x. You're right about just having a beefier PC, but maybe a baseline M2/M3 Air to SSH into a local machine + a beefier PC is a good combination. Luckly I switched to an all in terminal dev experience with Neovim/Helix/Tmux and the advantage is that one can seamlessly mix ssh/mosh shells in this workflow. Don't even need to set up any VNC/RDPs/Moonlights. Maybe even that is not needed if your languages supports ccache like tools. I'm mostly interested in compilation speed, maybe running some programs faster on beefier hardware and I don't mind working on Linux. So to recap, a baseline Air for portability(or some light ryzen laptop) plus a medium range PC seems like a winning combination for me. Given you already have a case/psu/ssd together they can cost as an entry level m3 macbook pro with 8GB of RAM.

gtirloni 3y ago

Not really. What workloads are you running that you experience waiting on a M1 with 64GB?

klohto 3y ago

wtf, you’re comparing 800W with 20W machine. No shit your workstation is more powerful, it’s a fucking workstation not a battery operated laptop. If you are troubled by loading on 64GB M1 Max, then congrats, you are doing workload that no laptop will handle.

rfoo 3y ago
> If you are troubled by loading on 64GB M1 Max, then congrats, you are doing workload that no laptop will handle. I can easily buy a laptop with 128GB RAM, eats more energy (100W+) and is more powerful. It's just that it does not have an Apple logo on it. Does it not count as a laptop?
- threeseed 3y ago
  > Does it not count as a laptop If it's drawing 100W then the poor battery life make it more like a semi-portable. Also given what we know about male fertility I wouldn't have that anywhere near my lap.
- audunw 3y ago
  > Does it not count as a laptop? In the literal sense? No. I don’t feel like those kinds of laptops are comfortable on my lap. To be a bit more serious, yeah sure they are laptops, but you tend to sacrifice portability, battery life and comfort. Which for most people are pretty important metrics for a laptop. “Luggable” is a term sometimes used about this class of products. I’m sure the poster was being hyperbolic. Of course you can find laptops with more RAM and some use cases that 64GB wouldn’t cover. But for most common tasks it’s more than enough.
  - happymellon 3y ago
    > In the literal sense? No. I don’t feel like those kinds of laptops are comfortable on my lap. Then in my experience, Apple did not make a pro laptop for a very long time until the M series came along. I remember my MacBook Pro from 2009 getting hot enough to hurt my legs, let alone any from the following decade that ran hotter.
lern_too_spel 3y ago
The M1 Max MacBook Pro is not a 20W machine. It will happily use 100 W if the CPU and GPU are in use. https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performance-review/3 https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc...

omnimus 3y ago

What are you even doing? I have refurbished workstation from 2016 (xeon with 32gig ram for 200usd) and the cheapest M1 air. And i am sitting here thinking we went past of what people need for personal/work computer because i can easily do my work on it and would get nothing from faster machines. Yes i dont compile big codebases (where i assume it done outside of my system anyway) but i just wonder what are the HW companies going to do to keep people upgrading their machines.

axelthegerman 3y ago
> but i just wonder what are the HW companies going to do to keep people upgrading their machines Easy, just drop software support for it and force you to buy a new one... Or switch to Linux
- omnimus 3y ago
  Tihis seems to be the way. Like even Windows is dropping older HW. At the same time it looks like great thing for Linux
broeng 3y ago
We'll find a way to use up what they can provide :-) With 64GB ram and our infrastructure defined with NixOS, I find myself building and spinning it up locally (in test mode) as part of working on it. Having ~10 VMs running locally with 2-3 GB of ram each quickly adds up. It feels a little dirty, but it's really nice to have the possibility. :-)
mixermachine 3y ago
I switched from an i7 1065g7, 32GB RAM to an M2 Pro (10 CPU cores), 32GB RAM. It makes a huge difference to me. Android Studio and Gradle builds are running a lot faster now. Before about 2-3 minutes, now less than a minute. My company builds an Android SDK for payments. For me the end is not reached and I'm looking forward to an upgrade in 3-5 years.
- omnimus 3y ago

satvikpendem 3y ago

Yes, I have an M1 Macbook Pro that I rarely use as I have a similar AMD-powered desktop machine as yours, and I'm usually at my desk anyway when working, so I simply don't use the laptop unless I need to travel. I'm looking to upgrade to the Threadrippers [0] next year however and get even more of a speed advantage. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37942418 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37942418

speedgoose 3y ago

Do you need that amount of memory on your laptop? My work M1 laptop has only 16gb of ram. If I need more ram I have access to many servers and use my laptop as a SSH console, a jupyter, or a VSCode client. The servers have up to 6TB of ram each, but I mostly use one with 512GB. I see that you can now order machines with 32TB of ram, like this one: https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/system/mp/6u/sys-681e-tr https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/system/mp/6u/sys-681e...

dboreham 3y ago
Not parent but we find that 16G macbooks are a bit chintzy for running container builds of particularly Rust projects.
faeriechangling 3y ago
When the M series laptops came out I thought that it made sense to be economical with memory, but LLM's became huge a few years after release and Apple Silicon happens to be local inferencing beasts that can use all the memory you can throw at it. At release I would have said most people should stick with as little memory as they could get away with due to Apple's pricing and the non-upgradability. Nowadays, I'd either recommend the M3 or M3 Pro and keeping things cheaper, but if you're going to get the Max at all, I sort of feel like you may as well go for the 16c cpu/40c GPU/128gb option at $1500 USD more and play around with stuff like Laama. It will become obsolete in not too long due to memory tech marching forwards, but it's still going to be plenty capable of dabbling with this stuff for awhile. The M3 Max has the memory bandwidth of a 4 dimm DDR5-6400 server which is pretty impressive given the pricing. Beyond that, I see people speccing high memory for things like VFX and Macs are pretty popular choices for those doing video work.

csomar 3y ago

Of course, a desktop is always going to be more performant. Especially if you have special cooling around.

lvncelot 3y ago

I have a workstation with a 3950x and 128gigs ram that I mostly use for fluid sims in Houdini and rendering tasks. There's honestly nothing that I'm doing on my work machine (an M2 macbook pro) that I feel would benefit from more cores or more RAM - really compute-intensive stuff gets offloaded to a server anyways. The only real difference I'm noticing is that emacs for some reason is just slower on osx than on linux, but that's not down to the raw performance, as even my 7 old Thinkpad with a 4-core i5 makes emacs feel way snappier than my macbook.

aeonik 3y ago
Have you native compiled Emacs? brew install emacs-plus@29 --with-native-comp I have a 5950x when 128GB of RAM, and an M1 Max. I was performance testing some Clojure code a few days ago (pure number crunching in parallel), and I was shocked to see it running faster in every test case on my M1 Mac. I think it might have more to do with memory bandwidth and thermals than the processing speed and cores.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

throw932490 3y ago

I gave up on carrying laptops. I travel between three locations, just with my phone and NVMe disk. All three locations have identical setup: monitors, workstation, desk, chair... Computer for me is a just docking station for a harddrive. I really hated dealing with USB dongles, power suspend and all that stuff. If I have to work on the go, I have bluetooth keyboard for my phone.

flohofwoe 3y ago

I'm in the other boat, but it's also not great for Apple. My min-spec 2021 14" MBP is so much overkill for the stuff I'm doing (C/C++ coding) that I probably won't need a faster one for a decade or so ;)

reimertz 3y ago

Ever considered Open Core? It works quite well, even for AMD CPUs. I happen to have the same CPU as you and been running my Hackintosh setup smoothly for 1.5 years. You can see my setup and full open core configuration here; https://github.com/reimertz/hackintosh-x570i-5950x-6800xt https://github.com/reimertz/hackintosh-x570i-5950x-6800xt The only caveat is intel-only cpu instructions that might cause certain apps to not work. The adobe suite is one example.

Unfrozen0688 3y ago

I mean yes? As someone with a gaming computer, I never understood devs that use a laptop... its way slower, waaaaaaay worse cooling = more noise and less expansion possible in terms of RAM, storage and ports.

faeriechangling 3y ago
Apple silicon is either totally silent, or totally silent/very quiet at idle (depending on settings) and not that loud at load. Apple is using the most power efficient chips on the planet and exhaustively optimised cooling solutions that use the aluminium case as a heatsink. I've tried to make an ATX gaming build silent, it never worked out satisfactorily after a lot of time and expense. I've done the silent gaming build and Apple Silicon and I cannot recommend Apple silicon enough. I spent many hours researching, building, and tweaking a computer buying premium components and at the end of the day the computer ended up being louder and less performant than the Mac I took out of the box and plugged into the wall. Even if I built that silent gaming PC perfectly, which is a big "if", the two big problems are that ATX gaming PCs are poorly designed for the passive cooling performance of the CPU/GPU/PSU, and that the lower performance/watt means that your gaming PC will likely have more coil whine for the same level of performance. Three is that the GOOD silent Intel/AMD machines are NOT gaming PCs, they're low powered PCs sold on aliexpress with a custom case that acts as a heatsink that are much cheaper than anything Apple sells. In terms of less expansion: - No expandable storage sucks, but it's also not a HUGE deal when 1TB is realistically going to be enough local storage for 90% of devs for the lifespan of the computer. - No expandable memory sucks, but you know what else sucks? Gaming desktops using dual channel memory running at maybe 100gb/s with the GPU choked off from accessing it by the PCIe bus. The price you pay to get a pooled 128gb memory the GPU/CPU can use at 400gb/s bandwidth from Apple is actually insanely low compared to the competition. - For ports, Apple is running three TB4 connectors and an HDMI 2.1 port with 168gb/s combined bandwidth with Wifi 6E/BT 5.3. Sure having lots of USB 3.0 ports is cool, but what else is cool is being able to have multiple laptops and setting up a desk which allows any of your laptops to connect to every peripheral via a single cable. - Finally, Apple Silicon holds its resale value, so selling your current model and buying a different one if needed is really not THAT big of a deal.

stephen_g 3y ago

Nah... Work laptop is a M2 Pro, 32GB ram. I need the form factor because I travel internationally with it, but it feels as fast as or faster than any other machine I have ever used...

norwalkbear 3y ago

Yes absolutely

faeriechangling 3y ago

Powerful how? M1 Max has like 8x the memory bandwidth of a 5950x running 4 sticks of memory. 5950x has more compute, and in practice compute heavy tasks are more optimised for the platform, but I don't actually find myself exploiting that all that often since I'm not a Linux Kernel compilation enthusiast. M3 Max is better than 5950x maybe 90-95% of the time and its shored up its weaknesses in raw compute horsepower. That being said, I'm getting more interested in a workstation myself because the M-series has stagnated in terms of memory bandwidth and a couple of used 3090's are pretty cheap.