27 ms·

It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

270 points by ingve 1y ago

quasarj 1y ago
Where are the Apple Silicon chips in this comparison?
brokenmachine 1y ago
CPU's have stagnated. 3 years ago, I bought a 12900k secondhand because it was near the fastest single core and I basically never max out on multi core. Every time I think about upgrading, I check the benchmarks and decide it's not worth the hassle. Even now, almost 4 years after the 12900k's release, it's only 13% slower than the very fastest $$$ processors on single core (9950X). I'm ignoring the Intel Core Ultras because I don't need those problems in my life.
miohtama 1y ago
Even better way to improve the quality of your computer sessions is "Just use Mac." Apple is so much ahead at the performance curve.
- milesrout 1y ago
  [dead]
- mgaunard 1y ago
  They have good performance, especially per watt, for a laptop. Certainly not ahead of the curve when considering server hardware.
  - nine_k 1y ago
    Not just that; they have a decent GPU and the unified memory architecture which allows to directly run many ML models locally with good performance. Server hardware is not very portable. Reserving a c7i.large is about $0.14/hour, this would equal the cost of an MBP M3 64GB in about two years. Apple have made a killer development machine, I say this as a person who does not like Apple and macOS.
    - alt227 1y ago
      Multi monitor support is still flaky and unreliable, cant boot linux environments, cant upgrade M.2 drives yourself, magic mouse still cannot be charged whilst using it etc etc. On top of that when you look at price vs performance they are way behind. Apple may have made good strides in single core cpu performance, but they have definitely not made killer development machines imo.
  - cornholio 1y ago
    Apple still has quite atrocious performance per $. So it economically makes sense for a top end developer or designer, but perhaps not the entire workforce let alone the non-professional users, students etc.
- cycomanic 1y ago
  Funny thing we just talked about this in a thread 2 days ago. Comments like this leads me to dismiss anything coming from apple fan boys. It's not like objective benchmarks disproving these sort of statements don't exist.
- alt227 1y ago
  In my experience comments like these are generally made by people who dont have much experience outside of using laptops.
2shortplanks 1y ago
This article skips a few important steps - how a faster CPU will have a demonstrable improvement on developer performance. I would agree with the idea that faster compile times can have a significant improvement in performance. 30s is long enough for a developer to get distracted and go off and check their email, look at social media, etc. Basically turning 30s into 3s can keep a developer in flow. The critical thing we’re missing here is how increasing the CPU speed will decrease the compile time. What if the compiler is IO bound? Or memory bound? Removing one bottleneck will get you to the next bottleneck, not necessarily get you all the performance gains you want
- mordae 1y ago
  IO bound compiler would be weird. Memory, perhaps, but newer CPUs also tend to be able to communicate with RAM faster, so... I think just having LSP give you answers 2x faster would be great for staying in flow.
  - crinkly 1y ago
    Compiler is usually IO bound on windows due to NTFS and the small files in MFT and lock contention problem. If you put everything on a ReFS volume it goes a lot faster. Applies to git operations as well.
    - blibble 1y ago
      by "IO bound" you mean "MS defender bound"
      - hypercube33 1y ago
        Dev Drive can help with that as well
  - cout 1y ago
    I've seen gcc+ld use a large amount of disk (dozens of GB) during LTO.
- 1y ago
mgaunard 1y ago
I've seen more and more companies embrace cloud workstations. It is of course more expensive but that allows them to offer the latest and greatest to their employees without needing all the IT staff to manage a physical installation. Then your actual physical computer is just a dumb terminal.
- milesrout 1y ago
  Great, now every operation has 300ms of latency. Kill me
  - datadrivenangel 1y ago
    Worse when the VPN they also force on you adds 300ms.
  - mgaunard 1y ago
    All of the big clouds have regions throughout the world so you should be able to find one less than 100ms away fairly easily. Then realistically in any company you'll need to interact with services and data in one specific location, so maybe it's better to be colocated there instead.
  - TiredOfLife 1y ago
    I wonder if everyone on HN has just woken from a 20 year coma.
  - dahart 1y ago
    If your ping is that high, you might be doing it wrong. Even Starlink is usually less than half that, usually a lot less. Most Remote Desktop setups I’ve seen are fairly and surprisingly responsive. It’s not quite as nice as a desktop 3 feet away, sure, but that only matters for a few things, and it’s good enough for most work. The tradeoff can be worth it since you can now work from anywhere via laptop and connect to the same machine. No need for multiple setups, most of the machine management is taken care of, upgrades are seamless. For various reasons I haven’t been able to move permanently to a cloud workstation, but TBH I often want to.
- 1y ago
JSR_FDED 1y ago
> Desktop CPUs are about 3x faster than laptop CPUs Maybe that’s an AMD (or even Intel) thing, but doesn’t hold for Apple silicon. I wonder if it holds for ARM in general?
- Sayrus 1y ago
  The author is talking about multi-core performance rather than single core. Apple silicon only offers a low number of cores on desktop chips compared to what Intel or AMD offers. Ampere offers chips than are an order of magnitude faster in multi-core but they are not exactly "desktop" chips. But they are a good data point to say it can be true for ARM if the offer is here.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - gloxkiqcza 1y ago
    > Apple silicon only offers a low number of cores on desktop chips compared to what Intel or AMD offers. * Apple: 32 cores (M3 Ultra) * AMD: 96 cores (Threadripper PRO 9995WX) * Intel: 60 cores (W‑9 3595X) I wouldn’t exactly call that low, but it is lower for sure. On the other hand, the stated AMD and Intel CPUs are borderline server grade and wouldn’t be found in a common developer machine.
    - brookst 1y ago
      Yeah i9-14900 and 9950x are better comparisons, at 24 and 16 cores respectively.
- wqaatwt 1y ago
  Apple doesn’t really make desktop CPUs, though. Just very good oversized mobile ones. For AMD/Intel laptop, desktop and server CPUs usually are based on different architectures and don’t have that much overlap.
  - brookst 1y ago
Rucadi 1y ago
I've been struggling with this topic a lot, I feel the slowness everyday and productivity loss of having slow computers, 30m for something that could take 10 times less... it's horrible.
- dahart 1y ago
  It is true, but also funny to think back on how slow computers used to be. Even the run-of-the-mill cheap machines today are like a million times faster than supercomputers from the 70s and 80s. We’ve always had the issue that we have to wait for our computers, even though for desktop personal computers there has been a speedup of like seven or eight orders of magnitude over the last 50 years. It could be better, but that has always been true. The things we ask computers to do grows as fast as the hardware speeds up. Why? So, in a way, slow computers is always a software problem, not a hardware problem. If we always wrote software to be as performant as possible, and if we only ran things that were within the capability of the machine, we’d never have to wait. But we don’t do that; good optimization takes a lot of developer time, and being willing to wait a few minutes nets me computations that are a couple orders of magnitude larger than what it can do in real time. To be fair, things have improved on average. Wait times are reduced for most things. Not as fast as hardware has sped up, but it is getting better over time.
avidiax 1y ago
Employers, even the rich FANG types, are quite penny-wise and pound-foolish when it comes to developer hardware. Limiting the number and size of monitors. Putting speedbumps (like assessments or doctor's notes) on ergo accessories. Requiring special approval for powerful hardware. Requiring special approval for travel, and setting hotel and airfare caps that haven't been adjusted for inflation. To be fair, I know plenty of people that would order the highest spec MacBook just to do web development and open 500 chrome tabs. There is abuse. But that abuse is really capped out at a few thousand in laptops, monitors and workstations, even with high-end specs, which is just a small fraction of one year's salary for a developer.
- tgma 1y ago
  FANG is not monolithic. Amazon is famously cheap. So is Apple in my opinion based on what I have heard (you get random refurbished hardware that is available not some standardized thing, sometimes with 8GB RAM sometimes something nicer) Apple is also famously cheap on their compensation. Back in the day they proudly said shit to the effect of "we deliberately don't pay you top of the market because you have to love Apple" to which the only valid answer is "go fuck yourself." Google and Facebook I don't think are cheap for developers. I can speak firsthand for my past Google experience. You have to note that the company has like 200k employees and there needs to be some controls and not all of the company are engineers. Hardware -> for the vast majority of stuff, you can build with blaze (think bazel) on a build cluster and cache, so local CPU is not as important. Nevertheless, you can easily order other stuff should you need to. Sure, if you go beyond the standard issue, your cost center will be charged and your manager gets an email. I don't think any decent manager would block you. If they do, change teams. Some powerful hardware that needs approval is blanket whitelisted for certain orgs that recognize such need. Trips -> Google has this interesting model you have a soft cap for trips and if you don't hit the cap, you pocket half of the trips credit in your account which you can choose to spend later when you are overcap or you want to get something slightly nicer the next time. Also, they have clear and sane policies on mixing personal and corporate travel. I encourage everyone to learn about and deploy things like that in their companies. The caps are usually not unreasonable, but if you do hit them, it is again an email to your management chain, not some big deal. Never seen it blocked. If your request is reasonable and your manager is shrugging about this stuff, that should reflect on them being cheap not the company policy.
poink 1y ago
I generally agree you should buy fast machines, but the difference between my 5950x (bought in mid 2021. I checked) and the latest 9950x is not particularly large on synthetic benchmarks, and the real world difference for a software developer who is often IO bound in their workflow is going to be negligible If you have a bad machine get a good machine, but you’re not going to get a significant uplift going from a good machine that’s a few years old to the latest shiny
- brookst 1y ago
  5950x is such a great platform. I can’t see replacing mine for several years at least.
  - unethical_ban 1y ago
    I enjoy building PCs so I've tried to justify upgrading my 5800x to a 9950x3d. But I really absolutely cannot justify it right now. I can play doom dark ages at 90fps 4k. I don't need it!
    - the__alchemist 1y ago
      FYI, going from some Radeon I had from 6 years ago to a 9950x made a huge impact on game frame rate: choppy to smoother-than-i-can-percieve. And much faster compile times, and code execution if using thread pools. But, I think it was a 3 series Radeon, not 5. Totally worth it compared to say, GPU costs
  - mwpmaybe 1y ago
    The combination of the twin Matisse I/O dies (one on the CPU package, one serving as the X570 chipset), Zen 3 chiplets, and overall maturity of the AM4 platform is still unmatched. I'm waiting for AM5 to "get good" before upgrading my 5950X (even though Zen 4 and Zen 5 chiplets are already quite good). I hope the next gen brings a core count bump, better DDR5 stability at higher speeds in 2DPC configurations, and USB4V2.
    - 1y ago
kaspar030 1y ago
> Top end CPUs are about 3x faster than the comparable top end models 3 years ago I wish that were true, but the current Ryzen 9950 is maybe 50% faster than the two generations older 5950, at compilation workloads.
- tgma 1y ago
  Not even. Probably closer to 30%, and that's if you are doing actual many-core compile workloads on your critical path.
  - ben-schaaf 1y ago
    Phoronix has actual benchmarks: https://www.phoronix.com/review/amd-ryzen-9950x-9900x/2 https://www.phoronix.com/review/amd-ryzen-9950x-9900x/2 It's not 3x, but it's most certainly above 1.3x. Average for compilation seems to be around 1.7-1.8x.
    - tgma 1y ago
      Oh, fair enough -- you are correct compared to 5950x. I was mentally comparing my personal experience with 7950x. Yes 1.7-1.9x seems fair for a bump from 5950x to 9950x (albeit at a higher power draw).
- szatkus 1y ago
  The author used kernel compilation as a benchmark. Which is weird, because for most projects a build process isn't as scalable as that (especially in the node.js ecosystem), even less after a full build.
bsder 1y ago
Or, perhaps, make it easier to run your stuff on a big machine over -> there. It doesn't have to be the cloud, but having a couple of ginormous machines in a rack where the fans can run at jet engine levels seems like a no-brainer.
einpoklum 1y ago
This is quite the silly argument. * "people" generally don't spend their time compiling the Linux kernel, or anything of the sort. * For most daily uses, current-gen CPUs are only marginally faster than two generations back. Not worth spending a large amount of money every 3 years or so. * Other aspects of your computer, like memory (capacity mostly) and storage, can also be perf bottlenecks. * If, as a developer, you're repeatedly compiling a large codebase - what you may really want is a build farm rather than the latest-gen CPU on each developer's individual PC/laptop.
- ralferoo 1y ago
  Just because it doesn't match your situation, doesn't make it a silly argument. Even though I haven't compiled a Linux kernel for over a decade, I still waste a lot of time compiling. On average, each week I have 5-6 half hour compiles, mostly when I'm forced to change base header files in a massive project. This is CPU bound for sure - I'm typically using just over half my 64GB RAM and my development drives are on RAIDed NVMe. I'm still on a Ryzen 7 5800X, because that's what my client specified they wanted me to use 3.5 years ago. Even upgrading to (already 3 years old) 5950X would be a drop-in replacement and double the core count so I'd expect about double the performance (although maybe not quite, as there my be increased memory contention). At current prices for that CPU, that upgrade would pay for itself in terms within 1-2 weeks. The reason I don't upgrade is policy - my client specified this exact CPU so that my development environment matches their standard setup. The build farm argument makes sense in an office environment where the majority of developer machines are mostly idle most of the time. It's completely unsuitable for remote working situations where each developer has a single machine and latency and bandwidth to shared resource is slow.
  - magicalhippo 1y ago
    Why is the client so strict on what you use as a dev machine?
    - ralferoo 1y ago
      I work in game development. All the developers typically have the same spec machine, chosen at the start of the project to be fairly high end with the expectation that when the project ships it'll be a roughly mid range spec.
hulitu 1y ago
> the top end CPU, AMD Ryzen 9 9950X This is an "office" CPU. Workstation CPUs are called Epyc.
- juped 1y ago
  Yeah. I would say, do get a better CPU, but do also research a bit deeper and really get a better CPU. Threadrippers are borderline workstation, too, though, esp. the pro SKUs.
  - fmajid 1y ago
    Threadrippers are workstation processors and support ECC, Epycs are servers and the 9950X is HEDT (high end desktop).
    - snvzz 1y ago
      Standard Ryzen chips also support ECC (minus the monolithic G models). I run 2x48GB ECC with my 9800x3d.
      - fmajid 1y ago
        Yes, but it's not tested or certified.
        snvzz 1y ago
        It's certainly less untrustworthy than running non-ECC anything.
        fmajid 1y ago
        Perhaps, but computer makers talk about "(engineering) workstations", they mean powerful machines that are meant to run professional apps like CATIA, and are certified by the makers of said software. If you're Airbus, you are not going to take chances running mission-critical design software on anything less. AMD's product for that market niche is Threadripper or EPYC, and Intel's is Xeon-W.
jhanschoo 1y ago
Important caveat that the author neglects to mention since they are discussing laptop CPUs in the same breath: The limiting factor on high-end laptops is their thermal envelope. Get the better CPU as long as it is more power efficient. Then get brands that design proper thermal solutions.
- krisroadruck 1y ago
  You simply cannot cram enough cooling and power into a laptop to have it equal a desktop high end desktop CPU of the same generation. There is physically not enough room. Just about the only way to even approach that would be to have liquid cooling loop ports out the back that you had to plug into an under-desk cooling loop and I don't think anyone is doing that because at that point just get a frickin desktop computer + all the other conveniences that come with it (discrete peripherals, multiple monitors, et cetera). I honestly do not understand why so many devs seem to insist on doing work on a laptop. My best guess is this is mostly the apple crowd because apple "desktops" are for the most part - just the same hardware in a larger box instead of being actually a different class of machine. A little better on the thermals, but not the drastic jump you see between laptops and desktops from AMD and Intel.
  - necovek 1y ago
    If you have to do any travel for work, a lightweight but fast portable machine that is easy to lug around beats any productivity gains from two machines (one much faster) due to the challenge of keeping two devices in sync.
    - lawn 1y ago
      I do this regularly and it's really not a big concern.
    - tuna74 1y ago
      Having a backup system can be kind of priceless sometimes. Also, if you have a desktop and a laptop you probably use one of them 80-90% of the time, so you rarely loose time syncing stuff.
derelicta 1y ago
I wonder what triggered this massive gains in term of CPU Perfs? Any major innovation I might have missed?
defanor 1y ago
This compares a new desktop CPU to older laptop ones. There are much more complete benchmarks on more specialized websites [0, 1]. > If you can justify an AI coding subscription, you can justify buying the best tool for the job. I personally can justify neither, but not seeing how one translates into another: is a faster CPU supposed to replace such a subscription? I thought those are more about large and closed models, and that GPUs would be more cost-effective as such a replacement anyway. And if it is not, it is quite a stretch to assume that all those who sufficiently benefit from a subscription would benefit at least as much from a faster CPU. Besides, usually it is not simply "a faster CPU": sockets and chipsets keep changing, so that would also be a new motherboard, new CPU cooler, likely new memory, which is basically a new computer. [0] https://www.cpubenchmark.net/ https://www.cpubenchmark.net/ [1] https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus
fxtentacle 1y ago
I wish I could. But most software nowadays is still limited by single core speed and that area hasn’t seen relevant growth in years. „Public whipping for companies who don’t parallelize their code base“ would probably help more. ;) Anyway, how many seconds does MS Teams need to boot on a top of the line CPU?
- amarcheschi 1y ago
  I'm forced to use teams and SharePoint in my university as a student and I hate every single interaction with it, I wish curse upon their creators, and may their descendants never have a smooth user experience with any software they use. Except for the ridiculous laggy interface, it has some functional bugs as well such as things just disappearing for a few days and then they pop up again
  - GloriousMEEPT 1y ago
    You're lucky to not have experienced what came before Teams in most corporate environments.
    - bigstrat2003 1y ago
      Lync and Skype for Business were far faster and more pleasant to use than Teams, in my experience.
    - bornfreddy 1y ago
      What do you have in mind? Skype was ok, and before that it was mostly e-mail in companies I had contact with. SharePoint sucked from its inception though.
DrNosferatu 1y ago
You can actually do a lot with a non-congested build server. But I would never say no to a faster CPU!
DrNosferatu 1y ago
But single core performance has been stagnant for ages! Considering ‘Geekbench 6’ scores, at least. So if it’s not a task massively benefiting from parallelization, buying used is still the best value for money.
- PartiallyTyped 1y ago
  I don’t think that’s true. AMD’s ****X3D chips are evidence that’s not true, with lots of benchmarks supporting this.
- bob1029 1y ago
  Single core performance has not been stagnant. We're about double where we were in 2015 for a range of workloads. Branch prediction, OoO execution, SIMD, etc. make a huge difference. The clock speed of a core is important and we are hitting physical limits there, but we're also getting more done with each clock cycle than ever before.
  - zozbot234 1y ago
    Doubling single-core performance in 10 years amounts to a less than 10% improvement year-over-year. That will feel like "stagnant" if you're on non-vintage hardware. Of course there are improvements elsewhere that partially offset this, but there's no need to upgrade all that often.
    - gred 1y ago
      > less than 10% improvement year-over-year. That will feel like "stagnant"... Especially when, in that same time frame, your code editor / mail client / instant messaging / conference call / container management / source code control / password manager software all migrate to Electron...
    - DrNosferatu 1y ago
      It’s actually just 7% improvements year over year!
- 1y ago
diminish 1y ago
Multi-core operations like compiling C/C++ could benefit. Single thread performance of 16-core AMD Ryzen 9 9950X is only 1.8x of my poor and old laptop's 4-core i5 performance. https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/6211vs3830vs3947/AMD-Ryzen-9-9950X-vs-Intel-i5-1135G7-vs-Intel-i7-11700 https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/6211vs3830vs3947/AMD-Ry... I'm waiting for >1024 core ARM desktops, with >1TB of unified gpu memory to be able to run some large LLMs with Ping me when some builds this :)
- zh3 1y ago
  Yes, just went from i3770 (12 years old!) to a 9900x as I tend to wait for a doubling of single core performance before upgrading (got through a lot of PCs in the 386/486 era!). It's actually only 50% faster according to cpubenchmark [0] but is twice as fast in local usage (multithread is reported about 3 times faster). Also got a Mac Mini M4 recently and that thing feels slow in comparison to both these systems - likely more of a UI/software thing (only use M4 for xcode) than being down to raw CPU performance. [0] https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-i9-9900K-vs-Intel-i7-3770/ https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-i9-9900K-vs-Intel...
  - fmajid 1y ago
    M4 is amazing hardware held up by a sub-par OS. One of the biggest bottlenecks when compiling software on a Mac is notarization, where every executable you compile causes a HTTP call to Apple. In addition to being a privacy nightmare, this causes the configure step in autoconf based packages to be excruciatingly slow.
    - gentooflux 1y ago
      They added always-connected DRM to software development, neat
      - fmajid 1y ago
        Exactly. They had promised to make notarization opt-out but reneged.
userbinator 1y ago
I wish developers, and I'm saying this as one myself, were forced to work on a much slower machine, to flush out those who can't write efficient code. Software bloat has already gotten worse by at least an order of magnitude in the past decade.
- zh3 1y ago
  Develop on a fast machine, test and optimise on a slow one?
- mft_ 1y ago
  I came here to say exactly this. If developers are frustrated by compilation times on last-generation hardware, maybe take a critical look at the code and libraries you're compiling. And as a siblimg comment notes, absolutely all testing should be on older hardware, without question, and I'd add with deliberately lower-quality and -speed data connections, too.
  - sweetjuly 1y ago
    This is one of the things which cheeses me the most about LLVM. I can't build LLVM on less than 16GB of RAM without it swapping to high heaven (and often it just gets OOM killed anyways). You'd think that LLVM needing >16GB to compile itself would be a signal to take a look at the memory usage of LLVM but, alas :)
    - jcranmer 1y ago
      The thing that causes you run out of memory isn't actually anything in LLVM, it's all in ld. If you're building with debugging info, you end up pulling in all of the debug symbols for deduplication purposes during linking, and that easily takes up a few GB. Now link a dozen small programs in parallel (because make -j) and you've got an OOM issue. But the linker isn't part of LLVM itself (unless you're using lld), so there's not much that LLVM can do about it. (If you're building with ninja, there's a cmake option to limit the parallelism of the link tasks to avoid this issue).
- 1y ago
gnfargbl 1y ago
OK, I'm convinced. Can someone tell me what to buy, specifically? Needs to run Ubuntu, support 2 x 4K monitors (3 would be nice), have at least 64GB RAM and fit on my desk. Don't particularly care how good the GPU is / is not. Here's my starting point: gmktec.com/products/amd-ryzen™-ai-max-395-evo-x2-ai-mini-pc. Anything better?
- zh3 1y ago
  Multimonitor with 4K tends to need fast GPU just for the bandwidth, else dragging large windows around can feel quite slow (found that out running 3 x 4K monitors on a low-end GPU).
- mft_ 1y ago
  Huh, that's a really good deal at 1500 USD for the 64Gb model considering the processor it's running. (It's the same one that's in the Framework desktop that there's been lots of noise about recently - lots of recent reviews on YouTube.) Get the 128Gb model for (currently) 1999 USD and you can play with running big local LLMs too. The 8060 iGPU is roughly equivalment to a mid-level nVidia laptop GPU, so it's plenty to deal with a normal workload, and some decent gaming or equivalent if needed.
  - gnfargbl 1y ago
    Yeah, I like the look of the Framework but the (relative) price and lead times are putting me off a little. There are also these which look similar https://www.bee-link.com/products/beelink-gtr9-pro-amd-ryzen-ai-max-395 https://www.bee-link.com/products/beelink-gtr9-pro-amd-ryzen...
    - arp242 1y ago
      From what I've been able to tell from interwebz reviews, the Framework one is better/faster as the GMTek is thermally throttled more. Dunno about the Beelink.
- fmajid 1y ago
  Beelink GTR9 Pro. It has dual 10G Ethernet interfaces. And get the 128GB RAM version, the RAM is not upgradeable. It isn't quite shipping yet, though. The absolute best would be a 9005 series Threadripper, but you will easily be pushing $10K+. The mainstream champ is the 9950X but despite being technically a mobile SOC the 395 gets you 90% of the real world performance of a 9950X in a much smaller and power efficient computer: https://www.phoronix.com/review/amd-ryzen-ai-max-arrow-lake/11 https://www.phoronix.com/review/amd-ryzen-ai-max-arrow-lake/...
blueflow 1y ago
Dunno. I got a Ryzen 7 with 16 cores from 2021 and the modern web still doesn't render smoothly. Maybe its not the hardware?
- mft_ 1y ago
  As an alternative anecdote, I've got a Ryzen 7 5800X from 2021, and it's stil blazingly fast for just about everything I throw at it...
- ofalkaed 1y ago
  Right now I am on my ancient cheap laptop with some 4 core intel and hard drive noises, the only time it has issues with webpages is when I have too many tabs open for its 4gigs of ram. My current laptop which is a 16 core Rhyzen 7 from about 2021 (x13) has never had an issue and I have yet to have too many tabs open on it. I think you might be having a OS/browser issue. As an aside, being on my old laptop with its hard drive, can't believe how slow life was before SSDs. I am enjoying listening to the hard drive work away and I am surprised to realize that I missed it.
- dahart 1y ago
  Maybe, but I can’t repro. Do you have a GPU? What browser? What web site? How much RAM do you have, and how much is available? What else is running on your machine? What OS, and is it a work machine with corporate antivirus?
jgb1984 1y ago
Specifically: buy a good desktop computer. I couldn't imagine working on a laptop several hours per day (even with an external screen + keyboard + mouse you're still stuck with subpar performance).
Apreche 1y ago
Too bad it’s so hard to get a completely local dev environment these days. It hardly matter what CPU I have since all the intensive stuff happens on another computer.
- alt227 1y ago
  You dont run an IDE with indexing, error checking and code completion?
  - porridgeraisin 1y ago
    vscode-server runs the LSP etc in the remote machine. The local machine is really just the UI.
furkansahin 1y ago
FWIW, my recent hn submission had a really good discussion on this very same topic. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44985323 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44985323
ezoe 1y ago
But, does your work constantly compile Linux kernel or encoding AES-256 more than 33GB/s?
sgarland 1y ago
Tangential: TIL you can compile the Linux kernel in < 1 minute (on top-spec hardware). Seems it’s been a while since I’ve done that, because I remember it being more like an hour or more.
- bornfreddy 1y ago
  I remember I was blown away by some machine that compiled it in ~45 minutes. Pentium Pro baby! Those were the days.
  - sgarland 1y ago
    My memory must be faulty, then, because I was mostly building it on an Athlon XP 2000+, which is definitely a few generations newer than a Pentium Pro. I’m probably thinking of various other packages, since at the time I was all-in on Gentoo. I distinctly remember trying to get distcc running to have the other computers (a Celeron 333 MHz and Pentium III 550 MHz) helping out for overnight builds. Can’t say that I miss that, because I spent more time configuring, troubleshooting, and building than using, but it did teach me a fair amount about Linux in general, and that’s definitely been worth it.
    - kelnos 1y ago
      Linux kernel compilation time depends heavily on what you're compiling though. You can have wildly different compilation times just by enabling or disabling some drivers or subsystems.
      - machomaster 1y ago
        Let's also not forget that kernel was not stagnant, but grew a lot over the years.
        kelnos 1y ago
        Also true! Hard to say which was moving faster, though: CPU speed increases & RAM amount increase, or the additional code and complexity written into the kernel.
miiiiiike 1y ago
Depends on the workload. I spent a few grand building a new machine with a 24-core CPU. And, while my gcc Docker builds are MUCH faster, the core Angular app still builds a few seconds slower than on my years old MacBook Pro. Even with all of my libraries split into atoms, built with Turbo, and other optimizations. 6-10 seconds to see a CSS change make its way from the editor to the browser is excruciating after a few hours, days, weeks, months, and years.
- renewiltord 1y ago
  Web development is crazy. Went from a Java/C codebase to a webdev company using TS. The latter would take minutes to build. The former would build in seconds and you could run a simulated backtest before the web app would be ready. It blew my mind. Truly this is more complicated than trading software.
  - thunderfork 1y ago
    A lot of this seems to have gotten a lot better with esbuild for me, at least, and maybe tsgo will be another big speed-up once it's done...
  - Tade0 1y ago
    For this reason the TypeScript 7 compiler will be written in Go. That won't help Angular, because its design doesn't lend itself to such speedups. The compiler produces a change detector function for every reactive structure such a class field, so the final app is necessarily huge.
  - anthk 1y ago
    No ccache?
feelamee 1y ago
more generally - it is worth it to pay for a good developer experience. It's not exactly about the CPU. As you compared build times - it is worth it to make a build faster. And, happily, often you don't need new CPU for this.
syngrog66 1y ago
"You should buy a faster CPU" is the post's actual title. And an evergreen bit of advice. Nothing new to see here, kids, please move along!
npn 1y ago
I find it crazy that some people only use a single laptop for their dev work. Meanwhile I have 3 PCs, 5 monitors, keyboards and mouses, and still think they are not enough. There are a lot of jobs that should run in a home server running 24/7 instead of abusing your poor laptop. Remote dedicated servers work, but the latency is killing your productivity, and it is pricey if you want a server with a lot of disk space.
- callc 1y ago
  I was away from my regular desktop dev PC for multiple months recently and only used a crappy laptop for dev work. I got used to it pretty quickly. This makes me remember so many years ago starting to program on a dual core plastic MacBook. Also, I’m very impressed by one of my coworkers working on 13 inch laptop only. Extremely smart. A bigger guy so I worry about his posture and RSI on such a small laptop. TLDR I think more screen space does not scale near linearly with productivity
- crazygringo 1y ago
  I dunno, alt+tab works as fast for me as moving my head to look at another monitor. And I'm not particularly concerned with "abusing" my laptop. I paid for its chips and all of its cores, I'm not going to not use them...
  - npn 1y ago
    it is not about the chips or cores. it is about the pcie ssd that you torture it with high temperature for a long period of time due to a laptop poor cooling. or the battery, it does not like high temperature either. you only regret it when it happens. and it will happen.
    - crazygringo 1y ago
      > and it will happen. I dunno... I've been doing this a long time. And haven't had any of the failures you're talking about. You're aware these machines throttle performance as necessary to prevent from getting too hot?
the__alchemist 1y ago
Tangent: IMO top tier CPU is a no brainer if you play games, run performance-sensitive software (molecular dynamics or w/e), or compile code. Look at GPU purchasing. It's full of price games, stock problems, scalpers, 3rd party boards with varying levels of factory overclock, and unreasonable prices. CPU is a comparative cake walk: go to Amazon or w/e, and buy the one with the highest numbers in its name.
- jandrese 1y ago
  It’s not quite that simple. Often the most expensive chips trade off raw clock speed for more cores, which can be counterproductive if your game only uses 4 threads.
- AnotherGoodName 1y ago
  For games its generally not worthwhile since the performance is almost entirely based on gpu these days. Almost all build guides will say ‘get midrange cpu X over high end chip Y and put the savings to a better GPU’. Consoles in particular are just a decent gpu with a fairly low end cpu these days. The xbox one with a 1.75Ghz 8core AMD from a couple of generations ago now is still playing all the latest games.
  - the__alchemist 1y ago
    Anecdote: I got a massive performance (FPS) improvement in games after upgrading CPU recently, with no GPU change. I think currently, that build guide doesn't apply based on what's going on with GPUs. Was valid in the past, and will be valid in the future, I hope!
    - ak217 1y ago
      How old was your previous CPU? Different people have vastly different expectations when it comes to upgrading. I'm certain I can play all of the games that I'm interested in on my 3 year old Ryzen 7600x, and that I'm limited by the 5 year old GPU (which I dread upgrading because of the crunch). Would someone with a 5 year old CPU be well served by upgrading to a 9600x, absolutely. But some people think they have to upgrade their Threadripper every year. (As far as work goes, I realize this directly contradicts the OP's point, which is the intent. If you know your workflow involves lots of compiling and local compute, absolutely buy a recent Threadripper. I find that most of the time the money spent on extra cores would be better spent on a more modest CPU with more RAM and a faster SSD. And more thoughtful developer tooling that doesn't force me to recompile the entire Rust work tree and its dependencies with every git pull.)
Joel_Mckay 1y ago
Like so many things it depends on the use-case... If you are gaming... than high core count chips like Epyc CPUs can actually perform worse in Desktops, and is a waste of money compared to Ryzen 7/Ryzen 9 X3D CPUs. Better to budget for the best motherboard, ram, and GPU combo supported by a specific application test-ranked CPU. In general, a value AMD GPU can perform well if you just play games, but Nvidia rtx cards are the only option for many CUDA applications. Check your model numbers, as marketers ruined naming conventions: https://opendata.blender.org/ https://opendata.blender.org/ https://www.cpubenchmark.net/multithread/ https://www.cpubenchmark.net/multithread/ https://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html https://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html Best of luck, we have been in the "good-enough" computing age for some time =3
shmerl 1y ago
Depends on what you need, but it's totally worth it if you want to spend less time say on compiling stuff. Video processing, compression, games and etc. Anything computationally heavy directly benefits from it.
beezle 1y ago
When ever I've built a new desktop I've always gone near the top performance with some consideration given to cache and power consumption (remember when peeps cared about that? lol). From dual pentium pros to my current desktop - Xeon E3-1245 v3 @ 3.40GHz built with 32 GB top end ram in late 2012 which has only recently started to feel a little pokey, I think largely due to cpu security mitigations added to Windows over the years. So that extra few hundred up front gets me many years extra on the backend.
- ocdtrekkie 1y ago
  I think people overestimate the value of a little bump in performance. I recently built a gaming PC with a 9700X. The 9800X3D is drastically more popular, for an 18% performance bump on benchmarks but double the power draw. I rarely peg my CPU, but I am always drawing power. Higher power draw means it runs hotter, and it stresses the power supply and cooling systems more. I'd rather go a little more modest for a system that's likely to wear out much, much slower.
  - rafaelmn 1y ago
    Is it really 2x or is it 2x at max load ? Since, as you say, you're not peggig the CPU - would be interesting to compare power usage on a task basis and the duration. Could be that the 3D cache is really adding that much overhead even to idle CPU. Anyway I've never regretted buying a faster CPU (GPU is a different story, burned some money there on short time window gains that were marginally relevant), but I did regret saving on it (going with M4 air vs M4 pro)
    - msk-lywenn 1y ago
      I recently had some fun overclocking my old i5 4690. IIRC, running the base frequency at 3.9Ghz instead of 3.5GHz, yield a very modest performance boost but added 20% more power consumption and temperature. I then underclocked it to 3.1Ghz and the thing barely ran at more than 40°C under load and power consumption was super low! The performance was more than mediocre though...
nchmy 1y ago
What's with the post title being completely incongruent with the article title? Moreover, I'm pretty sure this was not the case when it was first posted...
burnt-resistor 1y ago
Never buy the fastest new, always the 2nd~4th fastest, preferably used.
bullen 1y ago
Is it worth to keep your old CPU? I still run a 6600 (65W peak) from 2016 as my daily driver. I have replaced the SSD once (MLC lasted 5 years, hopefully forever with SLC drive from 2011?), 2x 32GB DDR4 sticks (Kingston Micron lasted 8 years, with aliexpress "samsung" sticks for $50 a pop) and Monitor (Eizo FlexScan 1932 lasted 15! years RIP with Eizo RadiForce 191M, highly recommend with f.lux/redshift for exceptional quality of image without blue light) It's still powerful enough to play any games released this year I throw at it at 60 FPS (with a low profile 3050 from 2024) let alone compile any bloat. Keep your old CPU until it breaks, completely... or actually until the motherboard breaks; I have a Kaby Lake 35W replacement waititng for the 6600 to die.
- chupasaurus 1y ago
  You could buy a SSD with SLC cache that is bigger than in 2011 pure SLC one, and probably cheaper.
  - bullen 1y ago
    We have gone through this if you look at my comment history. Yes you can do everything, but not without added complexity, that will end up failing faster. We have peaked in all tech. Nothing will ever get as good as the raw peak in longevity: - SSDs ~2011 (pure SLC) - RAM ~2013 (DDR3 fast low latency but low Hz = cooler = lasts longer) - CPUs ~2018 (debatable but I think those will outlast everything else)
    - moffkalast 1y ago
      I'd expect every new generation of computers to not last as long as the last one, we keep reducing the transistor size and that means more fragility. I'm half surprised modern GPUs make it through shipping without melting from static. My guess is that the most long lived computer gen could be one that still uses through hole components. Not a very useful machine by any metric though I bet.
      - aftbit 1y ago
a3w 1y ago
I do not care if my CPU is 10 years old. Everything is instant anyway.
qalmakka 1y ago
I bought one too. It's bananas how powerful the R9 9950X is. And it runs great with a €40 Thermalright cooler too - no need for AIO liquid cooling! It's amazing how great AMD CPUs got.
kelnos 1y ago
The new top of the line CPU might only cost $500, but even if you have a Framework laptop with replaceable parts, the new top-of-the-line mainboard is going to cost you north of $1k. If you don't, you're probably talking about a new $2k+ full laptop purchase. And I don't want a desktop. But I would agree that, when you are purchasing that new laptop (or mainboard), you get the best that you can afford. Pushing your upgrade cycle out even just one year can save you a lot of money, while still getting the performance you need.
joshka 1y ago
At my former job at a FAANG, I did the math on allocating developers machines with 16GB vs 64GB based on actual job tasks with estimates of how much thumb twiddling waiting time that this would save and then multiplied that out by the cost of the developer's time. The cost benefit showed a reasonable ROI that was realized in Weeks for Senior dev salaries (months for juniors). Based on this, I strongly believe that if you're providing hardware for software engineers, it rarely if ever makes sense to buy anything but the top spec Macbook Pro available, and to upgrade every 2-3 years. I can't comment on non desktop / non-mac scenarios or other job families. YMMV.
- svantana 1y ago
  No doubt the math checks out, but I wonder if developer productivity can be quantified that easily. I believe there's a lot of research pointing to people having a somewhat fixed amount of cognitive capacity available per day, and that aligns well with my personal experience. A lot of times, waiting for the computer to finish feels like a micro-break that saves up energy for my next deep thought process.
  - CamouflagedKiwi 1y ago
    Well depends what kind of time periods you're talking. I've seen one in the past that was 60 minutes vs. 20 minutes (for a full clean compile, but often that is where you find yourself) - that is far more than a micro-break, that is a big chunk of time wasted.
  - arcfour 1y ago
    Simple estimates work surprisingly well for a lot of things because a lot of the 'unquantifiable' complexity being ignored behaves like noise. When you have dozens of factors pulling in different directions—some developers multitask better, some lose flow more easily, some codebases are more memory-hungry, and so on—it all tends to just average out, and the result is reasonably accurate. Accurate enough that it's useful data to make a decision with, at least.
    - 1y ago
vondur 1y ago
I suppose it depends on the programming tasks you do. If you are working on stuff like recompiling large codebases all day- then yes, a fast CPU and and lots of RAM will really help. If you are working more on scripting stuff, then maybe the fastest CPU isn't really needed, rather more RAM. I just bought myself a Ryzen 9950x deal from a local Microcenter. I will run handbrake on ripped files which this CPU is really good at.
- nazgul17 1y ago
  I worked on a Spring Boot application that would take more than a minute to start. Not Spring's fault, IIUC, but nevertheless a focus killer.
  - MBCook 1y ago
    A minute? What was taking so long? Spring itself is only a few seconds (as you said that’s not the issue). That sounds horrible to work on.
    - olavgg 1y ago
      If you have many beans that does IO, startup will be slower. For example, just removing sql/database initialization can shave off a second.
theYipster 1y ago
My 5 year old Threadripper with 128GB RAM is still going strong. A 9950x would probably be faster (especially for single thread,) but moving to AM5 would be a massive downgrade on IO. Can't really see spending $10K now for a TRX50 or WRX90 build... Maybe when Zen 6 Threadrippers come out.
WarOnPrivacy 1y ago
There are peaks in long-term CPU value. That is, CPUs that are 1) performant enough to handle general purpose computing for a decade and 2) outperform later chips for a long time. The i7-4770 was one. It reliably outperformed later Intel CPUs until near 10th gen or so. I know shops that are still plugging away on them. The first comparable replacements for it is the i7-12700 (but the i5-12400 is a good buy). At 13th gen, Intel swaps E for P cores. They have their place but I still prefer 12th gen for new desktops. Past all that, the author is right about the AMD Ryzen 9950x. It's a phenomenal chip. I used one in a friend's custom build (biz, local llm) and it'll be in use in 2035.
- mwpmaybe 1y ago
  > The i7-4770 was one. It reliably outperformed later Intel CPUs until near 10th gen or so. Per which benchmarks? > At 13th gen, Intel swaps E for P cores. One nit, Intel started adding (not swapping) E-cores to desktop parts with 12th gen, but i3 parts and most i5 parts were spared. More desktop i5 parts got them as starting with 13th gen.
- zozbot234 1y ago
  What's wrong with E cores? They're the best bang for the buck for both baseline low-power usage (and real-world systems are idle a lot of the time) and heavy multicore workloads. An E-core cluster takes a tiny fraction of area and power compared to a P-core, so it's not just a one-on-one comparison.
dbg31415 1y ago
It's worth paying for reliability. If that also means more speed, fine -- but raw CPU benchmarks rarely matter outside of very specific workloads. What you'll notice day to day is whether the machine crashes, wipes out a project, or forces you into an unexpected week of downtime. Computers are like lightbulbs, and laptops are the extra fragile kind. They burn out. I've never had one more than five years, and after year three I just assume it could fail at any moment -- whether it's an SSD crash, a swollen battery, or drivers breaking after the next OS update. If you replace machines every three years, like I do, you're not necessarily paying for performance -- you're really just paying for peace of mind.
nipperkinfeet 1y ago
I'm still using the same CPU I had 15 years ago. It's an AMD Phenom II X6 1090T. The only upgrades I've made are increasing the RAM to 16 GB and replacing the hard drive with an SSD. It continues to meet all my needs.
tyleo 1y ago
Oh this is fun. My company recently did a garage sale on old hardware and I intend to post something similar compiling across 4 different hardwares and 4 different languages. I’m including some M series Macs in the mix though because the main motivation behind me doing this is how astonishing even their mobile performance is.
Havoc 1y ago
I suspect for most a faster SSD is probably the better bet
credit_guy 1y ago
My explanation:corporations want to benefit from scale. That means lots of computers with identical specs. Not only everyone gets the same machine, they get the same machine for many years. It's not unthinkable for a spec to stay constant for 5 years. In exchange for this stability, the makers of the machines (Dell, HP) can lower the price significantly. As a corporation you can buy a very powerful machine for something that a regular consumer needs to pay about twice the price. But that's when the spec is new. As years pass, a machine with the same spec gets to be downright sluggish.
deleted 1y ago
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dlevine 1y ago
Something I find weird is that this article compares a 9950x with two different laptop CPUs and concludes that performance has increased massively in the past few years. If you compare the 9950x with its two Desktop predecessors (released 2 and 4 years before), you see about a 6% increase from the 7950x and a 45% increase from the 5950x. So you should consider upgrading regularly, but potentially not every single generation. I think it makes sense to consider the performance and offer an upgrade when you see a 50% or so cumulative improvement. Everywhere I have worked has upgraded developers every 3-4 years, and it might make sense to upgrade if there is a massive change (like when Macbooks went to M-series). As for Desktop vs Laptop, that is relevant too. Desktops are typically much faster than Laptops because they are allowed much larger power envelopes, which leads to more cores and higher clock speeds for sustained periods of time. However, there is always a question as to whether your use case will be able to use all 16/32 cores/threads in a 9950X CPU. If not, you may not notice much difference with a smaller processor. Source for CPU benchmarks: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/6211vs5031vs3862vs5717/AMD-Ryzen-9-9950X-vs-AMD-Ryzen-9-7950X-vs-AMD-Ryzen-9-5950X-vs-Intel-i9-14900K https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/6211vs5031vs3862vs5717/...
tucnak 1y ago
On a different note. I just bought a Sienna-series EPYC, which is a 48-core Zen 4c chip capped at 200W. AMD 8434PN at 1200 EUR price-point. My understanding is it's a two- or three years out-of-date CPU, but I was simply blown away! I contemplated purchasing a 9005-class CPU, but even 32-core variant would cost more than 3000 EUR... at sommat crazy like 400W. Thank you, my PCIe stuff alone draws a kilowatt; no way I'm putting in a 400W CPU on top.
raudette 1y ago
My issue with corporate laptops isn't so much the PC's hardware but the antimalware. I'm not even sure what the antimalware does, and I think, at one time or another, I've probably had all the major ones installed, and they've all managed to slow down my PC down to frustratingly slow speeds.
msarrel 1y ago
It almost never makes sense to buy the fastest CPU.
1vuio0pswjnm7 1y ago
Blog post only mentions CPU whilst comments responding to it change subject to RAM and storage
k4rli 1y ago
JS ~~devs~~ writers keep managing to make their bloatware run slow even on highend hardware. Ryzen 9 7900x + 128GB ram + 6900XT + arch yet Cursor IDE still manages to be incredibly slow and freezing up after re-focusing. Even base VSCodium is many times faster than that. I can have AAA game + kernel build + 100 Firefox tabs active at the same time, yet a piece of JS makes the hardware seem garbage.
- 4gotunameagain 1y ago
  Hey, don't call them devs. They are software engineers. They engineer that 8MB javascript page.
thewileyone 1y ago
Laptop yes cause you can't change it. Desktop maybe if the cost is within your budget. I always recommend people set an honest limit to what they're willing to spend and buy the best that limit can afford.

270 points by ingve 1y ago

Where are the Apple Silicon chips in this comparison?

CPU's have stagnated. 3 years ago, I bought a 12900k secondhand because it was near the fastest single core and I basically never max out on multi core. Every time I think about upgrading, I check the benchmarks and decide it's not worth the hassle. Even now, almost 4 years after the 12900k's release, it's only 13% slower than the very fastest $$$ processors on single core (9950X). I'm ignoring the Intel Core Ultras because I don't need those problems in my life.

miohtama 1y ago

Even better way to improve the quality of your computer sessions is "Just use Mac." Apple is so much ahead at the performance curve.

milesrout 1y ago
[dead]
mgaunard 1y ago
They have good performance, especially per watt, for a laptop. Certainly not ahead of the curve when considering server hardware.
- nine_k 1y ago
  Not just that; they have a decent GPU and the unified memory architecture which allows to directly run many ML models locally with good performance. Server hardware is not very portable. Reserving a c7i.large is about $0.14/hour, this would equal the cost of an MBP M3 64GB in about two years. Apple have made a killer development machine, I say this as a person who does not like Apple and macOS.
  - alt227 1y ago
    Multi monitor support is still flaky and unreliable, cant boot linux environments, cant upgrade M.2 drives yourself, magic mouse still cannot be charged whilst using it etc etc. On top of that when you look at price vs performance they are way behind. Apple may have made good strides in single core cpu performance, but they have definitely not made killer development machines imo.
- cornholio 1y ago
  Apple still has quite atrocious performance per $. So it economically makes sense for a top end developer or designer, but perhaps not the entire workforce let alone the non-professional users, students etc.
cycomanic 1y ago
Funny thing we just talked about this in a thread 2 days ago. Comments like this leads me to dismiss anything coming from apple fan boys. It's not like objective benchmarks disproving these sort of statements don't exist.
alt227 1y ago
In my experience comments like these are generally made by people who dont have much experience outside of using laptops.

2shortplanks 1y ago

This article skips a few important steps - how a faster CPU will have a demonstrable improvement on developer performance. I would agree with the idea that faster compile times can have a significant improvement in performance. 30s is long enough for a developer to get distracted and go off and check their email, look at social media, etc. Basically turning 30s into 3s can keep a developer in flow. The critical thing we’re missing here is how increasing the CPU speed will decrease the compile time. What if the compiler is IO bound? Or memory bound? Removing one bottleneck will get you to the next bottleneck, not necessarily get you all the performance gains you want

mordae 1y ago
IO bound compiler would be weird. Memory, perhaps, but newer CPUs also tend to be able to communicate with RAM faster, so... I think just having LSP give you answers 2x faster would be great for staying in flow.
- crinkly 1y ago
  Compiler is usually IO bound on windows due to NTFS and the small files in MFT and lock contention problem. If you put everything on a ReFS volume it goes a lot faster. Applies to git operations as well.
  - blibble 1y ago
    by "IO bound" you mean "MS defender bound"
    - hypercube33 1y ago
      Dev Drive can help with that as well
- cout 1y ago
  I've seen gcc+ld use a large amount of disk (dozens of GB) during LTO.
1y ago

mgaunard 1y ago

I've seen more and more companies embrace cloud workstations. It is of course more expensive but that allows them to offer the latest and greatest to their employees without needing all the IT staff to manage a physical installation. Then your actual physical computer is just a dumb terminal.

milesrout 1y ago
Great, now every operation has 300ms of latency. Kill me
- datadrivenangel 1y ago
  Worse when the VPN they also force on you adds 300ms.
- mgaunard 1y ago
  All of the big clouds have regions throughout the world so you should be able to find one less than 100ms away fairly easily. Then realistically in any company you'll need to interact with services and data in one specific location, so maybe it's better to be colocated there instead.
- TiredOfLife 1y ago
  I wonder if everyone on HN has just woken from a 20 year coma.
- dahart 1y ago
  If your ping is that high, you might be doing it wrong. Even Starlink is usually less than half that, usually a lot less. Most Remote Desktop setups I’ve seen are fairly and surprisingly responsive. It’s not quite as nice as a desktop 3 feet away, sure, but that only matters for a few things, and it’s good enough for most work. The tradeoff can be worth it since you can now work from anywhere via laptop and connect to the same machine. No need for multiple setups, most of the machine management is taken care of, upgrades are seamless. For various reasons I haven’t been able to move permanently to a cloud workstation, but TBH I often want to.
1y ago

JSR_FDED 1y ago

> Desktop CPUs are about 3x faster than laptop CPUs Maybe that’s an AMD (or even Intel) thing, but doesn’t hold for Apple silicon. I wonder if it holds for ARM in general?

Sayrus 1y ago
The author is talking about multi-core performance rather than single core. Apple silicon only offers a low number of cores on desktop chips compared to what Intel or AMD offers. Ampere offers chips than are an order of magnitude faster in multi-core but they are not exactly "desktop" chips. But they are a good data point to say it can be true for ARM if the offer is here.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- gloxkiqcza 1y ago
  > Apple silicon only offers a low number of cores on desktop chips compared to what Intel or AMD offers. * Apple: 32 cores (M3 Ultra) * AMD: 96 cores (Threadripper PRO 9995WX) * Intel: 60 cores (W‑9 3595X) I wouldn’t exactly call that low, but it is lower for sure. On the other hand, the stated AMD and Intel CPUs are borderline server grade and wouldn’t be found in a common developer machine.
  - brookst 1y ago
    Yeah i9-14900 and 9950x are better comparisons, at 24 and 16 cores respectively.
wqaatwt 1y ago
Apple doesn’t really make desktop CPUs, though. Just very good oversized mobile ones. For AMD/Intel laptop, desktop and server CPUs usually are based on different architectures and don’t have that much overlap.
- brookst 1y ago

Rucadi 1y ago

I've been struggling with this topic a lot, I feel the slowness everyday and productivity loss of having slow computers, 30m for something that could take 10 times less... it's horrible.

dahart 1y ago
It is true, but also funny to think back on how slow computers used to be. Even the run-of-the-mill cheap machines today are like a million times faster than supercomputers from the 70s and 80s. We’ve always had the issue that we have to wait for our computers, even though for desktop personal computers there has been a speedup of like seven or eight orders of magnitude over the last 50 years. It could be better, but that has always been true. The things we ask computers to do grows as fast as the hardware speeds up. Why? So, in a way, slow computers is always a software problem, not a hardware problem. If we always wrote software to be as performant as possible, and if we only ran things that were within the capability of the machine, we’d never have to wait. But we don’t do that; good optimization takes a lot of developer time, and being willing to wait a few minutes nets me computations that are a couple orders of magnitude larger than what it can do in real time. To be fair, things have improved on average. Wait times are reduced for most things. Not as fast as hardware has sped up, but it is getting better over time.

avidiax 1y ago

Employers, even the rich FANG types, are quite penny-wise and pound-foolish when it comes to developer hardware. Limiting the number and size of monitors. Putting speedbumps (like assessments or doctor's notes) on ergo accessories. Requiring special approval for powerful hardware. Requiring special approval for travel, and setting hotel and airfare caps that haven't been adjusted for inflation. To be fair, I know plenty of people that would order the highest spec MacBook just to do web development and open 500 chrome tabs. There is abuse. But that abuse is really capped out at a few thousand in laptops, monitors and workstations, even with high-end specs, which is just a small fraction of one year's salary for a developer.

tgma 1y ago
FANG is not monolithic. Amazon is famously cheap. So is Apple in my opinion based on what I have heard (you get random refurbished hardware that is available not some standardized thing, sometimes with 8GB RAM sometimes something nicer) Apple is also famously cheap on their compensation. Back in the day they proudly said shit to the effect of "we deliberately don't pay you top of the market because you have to love Apple" to which the only valid answer is "go fuck yourself." Google and Facebook I don't think are cheap for developers. I can speak firsthand for my past Google experience. You have to note that the company has like 200k employees and there needs to be some controls and not all of the company are engineers. Hardware -> for the vast majority of stuff, you can build with blaze (think bazel) on a build cluster and cache, so local CPU is not as important. Nevertheless, you can easily order other stuff should you need to. Sure, if you go beyond the standard issue, your cost center will be charged and your manager gets an email. I don't think any decent manager would block you. If they do, change teams. Some powerful hardware that needs approval is blanket whitelisted for certain orgs that recognize such need. Trips -> Google has this interesting model you have a soft cap for trips and if you don't hit the cap, you pocket half of the trips credit in your account which you can choose to spend later when you are overcap or you want to get something slightly nicer the next time. Also, they have clear and sane policies on mixing personal and corporate travel. I encourage everyone to learn about and deploy things like that in their companies. The caps are usually not unreasonable, but if you do hit them, it is again an email to your management chain, not some big deal. Never seen it blocked. If your request is reasonable and your manager is shrugging about this stuff, that should reflect on them being cheap not the company policy.

poink 1y ago

I generally agree you should buy fast machines, but the difference between my 5950x (bought in mid 2021. I checked) and the latest 9950x is not particularly large on synthetic benchmarks, and the real world difference for a software developer who is often IO bound in their workflow is going to be negligible If you have a bad machine get a good machine, but you’re not going to get a significant uplift going from a good machine that’s a few years old to the latest shiny

brookst 1y ago
5950x is such a great platform. I can’t see replacing mine for several years at least.
- unethical_ban 1y ago
  I enjoy building PCs so I've tried to justify upgrading my 5800x to a 9950x3d. But I really absolutely cannot justify it right now. I can play doom dark ages at 90fps 4k. I don't need it!
  - the__alchemist 1y ago
    FYI, going from some Radeon I had from 6 years ago to a 9950x made a huge impact on game frame rate: choppy to smoother-than-i-can-percieve. And much faster compile times, and code execution if using thread pools. But, I think it was a 3 series Radeon, not 5. Totally worth it compared to say, GPU costs
- mwpmaybe 1y ago
  The combination of the twin Matisse I/O dies (one on the CPU package, one serving as the X570 chipset), Zen 3 chiplets, and overall maturity of the AM4 platform is still unmatched. I'm waiting for AM5 to "get good" before upgrading my 5950X (even though Zen 4 and Zen 5 chiplets are already quite good). I hope the next gen brings a core count bump, better DDR5 stability at higher speeds in 2DPC configurations, and USB4V2.
  - 1y ago

kaspar030 1y ago

> Top end CPUs are about 3x faster than the comparable top end models 3 years ago I wish that were true, but the current Ryzen 9950 is maybe 50% faster than the two generations older 5950, at compilation workloads.

tgma 1y ago
Not even. Probably closer to 30%, and that's if you are doing actual many-core compile workloads on your critical path.
- ben-schaaf 1y ago
  Phoronix has actual benchmarks: https://www.phoronix.com/review/amd-ryzen-9950x-9900x/2 https://www.phoronix.com/review/amd-ryzen-9950x-9900x/2 It's not 3x, but it's most certainly above 1.3x. Average for compilation seems to be around 1.7-1.8x.
  - tgma 1y ago
    Oh, fair enough -- you are correct compared to 5950x. I was mentally comparing my personal experience with 7950x. Yes 1.7-1.9x seems fair for a bump from 5950x to 9950x (albeit at a higher power draw).
szatkus 1y ago
The author used kernel compilation as a benchmark. Which is weird, because for most projects a build process isn't as scalable as that (especially in the node.js ecosystem), even less after a full build.

bsder 1y ago

Or, perhaps, make it easier to run your stuff on a big machine over -> there. It doesn't have to be the cloud, but having a couple of ginormous machines in a rack where the fans can run at jet engine levels seems like a no-brainer.

einpoklum 1y ago

This is quite the silly argument. * "people" generally don't spend their time compiling the Linux kernel, or anything of the sort. * For most daily uses, current-gen CPUs are only marginally faster than two generations back. Not worth spending a large amount of money every 3 years or so. * Other aspects of your computer, like memory (capacity mostly) and storage, can also be perf bottlenecks. * If, as a developer, you're repeatedly compiling a large codebase - what you may really want is a build farm rather than the latest-gen CPU on each developer's individual PC/laptop.

ralferoo 1y ago
Just because it doesn't match your situation, doesn't make it a silly argument. Even though I haven't compiled a Linux kernel for over a decade, I still waste a lot of time compiling. On average, each week I have 5-6 half hour compiles, mostly when I'm forced to change base header files in a massive project. This is CPU bound for sure - I'm typically using just over half my 64GB RAM and my development drives are on RAIDed NVMe. I'm still on a Ryzen 7 5800X, because that's what my client specified they wanted me to use 3.5 years ago. Even upgrading to (already 3 years old) 5950X would be a drop-in replacement and double the core count so I'd expect about double the performance (although maybe not quite, as there my be increased memory contention). At current prices for that CPU, that upgrade would pay for itself in terms within 1-2 weeks. The reason I don't upgrade is policy - my client specified this exact CPU so that my development environment matches their standard setup. The build farm argument makes sense in an office environment where the majority of developer machines are mostly idle most of the time. It's completely unsuitable for remote working situations where each developer has a single machine and latency and bandwidth to shared resource is slow.
- magicalhippo 1y ago
  Why is the client so strict on what you use as a dev machine?
  - ralferoo 1y ago
    I work in game development. All the developers typically have the same spec machine, chosen at the start of the project to be fairly high end with the expectation that when the project ships it'll be a roughly mid range spec.

hulitu 1y ago

> the top end CPU, AMD Ryzen 9 9950X This is an "office" CPU. Workstation CPUs are called Epyc.

juped 1y ago
Yeah. I would say, do get a better CPU, but do also research a bit deeper and really get a better CPU. Threadrippers are borderline workstation, too, though, esp. the pro SKUs.
- fmajid 1y ago
  Threadrippers are workstation processors and support ECC, Epycs are servers and the 9950X is HEDT (high end desktop).
  - snvzz 1y ago
    Standard Ryzen chips also support ECC (minus the monolithic G models). I run 2x48GB ECC with my 9800x3d.
    - fmajid 1y ago
      Yes, but it's not tested or certified.
      - snvzz 1y ago
        It's certainly less untrustworthy than running non-ECC anything.
        fmajid 1y ago
        Perhaps, but computer makers talk about "(engineering) workstations", they mean powerful machines that are meant to run professional apps like CATIA, and are certified by the makers of said software. If you're Airbus, you are not going to take chances running mission-critical design software on anything less. AMD's product for that market niche is Threadripper or EPYC, and Intel's is Xeon-W.

jhanschoo 1y ago

Important caveat that the author neglects to mention since they are discussing laptop CPUs in the same breath: The limiting factor on high-end laptops is their thermal envelope. Get the better CPU as long as it is more power efficient. Then get brands that design proper thermal solutions.

krisroadruck 1y ago
You simply cannot cram enough cooling and power into a laptop to have it equal a desktop high end desktop CPU of the same generation. There is physically not enough room. Just about the only way to even approach that would be to have liquid cooling loop ports out the back that you had to plug into an under-desk cooling loop and I don't think anyone is doing that because at that point just get a frickin desktop computer + all the other conveniences that come with it (discrete peripherals, multiple monitors, et cetera). I honestly do not understand why so many devs seem to insist on doing work on a laptop. My best guess is this is mostly the apple crowd because apple "desktops" are for the most part - just the same hardware in a larger box instead of being actually a different class of machine. A little better on the thermals, but not the drastic jump you see between laptops and desktops from AMD and Intel.
- necovek 1y ago
  If you have to do any travel for work, a lightweight but fast portable machine that is easy to lug around beats any productivity gains from two machines (one much faster) due to the challenge of keeping two devices in sync.
  - lawn 1y ago
    I do this regularly and it's really not a big concern.
  - tuna74 1y ago
    Having a backup system can be kind of priceless sometimes. Also, if you have a desktop and a laptop you probably use one of them 80-90% of the time, so you rarely loose time syncing stuff.

derelicta 1y ago

I wonder what triggered this massive gains in term of CPU Perfs? Any major innovation I might have missed?

defanor 1y ago

This compares a new desktop CPU to older laptop ones. There are much more complete benchmarks on more specialized websites [0, 1]. > If you can justify an AI coding subscription, you can justify buying the best tool for the job. I personally can justify neither, but not seeing how one translates into another: is a faster CPU supposed to replace such a subscription? I thought those are more about large and closed models, and that GPUs would be more cost-effective as such a replacement anyway. And if it is not, it is quite a stretch to assume that all those who sufficiently benefit from a subscription would benefit at least as much from a faster CPU. Besides, usually it is not simply "a faster CPU": sockets and chipsets keep changing, so that would also be a new motherboard, new CPU cooler, likely new memory, which is basically a new computer. [0] https://www.cpubenchmark.net/ https://www.cpubenchmark.net/ [1] https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus

fxtentacle 1y ago

I wish I could. But most software nowadays is still limited by single core speed and that area hasn’t seen relevant growth in years. „Public whipping for companies who don’t parallelize their code base“ would probably help more. ;) Anyway, how many seconds does MS Teams need to boot on a top of the line CPU?

amarcheschi 1y ago
I'm forced to use teams and SharePoint in my university as a student and I hate every single interaction with it, I wish curse upon their creators, and may their descendants never have a smooth user experience with any software they use. Except for the ridiculous laggy interface, it has some functional bugs as well such as things just disappearing for a few days and then they pop up again
- GloriousMEEPT 1y ago
  You're lucky to not have experienced what came before Teams in most corporate environments.
  - bigstrat2003 1y ago
    Lync and Skype for Business were far faster and more pleasant to use than Teams, in my experience.
  - bornfreddy 1y ago
    What do you have in mind? Skype was ok, and before that it was mostly e-mail in companies I had contact with. SharePoint sucked from its inception though.

DrNosferatu 1y ago

You can actually do a lot with a non-congested build server. But I would never say no to a faster CPU!

DrNosferatu 1y ago

But single core performance has been stagnant for ages! Considering ‘Geekbench 6’ scores, at least. So if it’s not a task massively benefiting from parallelization, buying used is still the best value for money.

PartiallyTyped 1y ago
I don’t think that’s true. AMD’s ****X3D chips are evidence that’s not true, with lots of benchmarks supporting this.
bob1029 1y ago
Single core performance has not been stagnant. We're about double where we were in 2015 for a range of workloads. Branch prediction, OoO execution, SIMD, etc. make a huge difference. The clock speed of a core is important and we are hitting physical limits there, but we're also getting more done with each clock cycle than ever before.
- zozbot234 1y ago
  Doubling single-core performance in 10 years amounts to a less than 10% improvement year-over-year. That will feel like "stagnant" if you're on non-vintage hardware. Of course there are improvements elsewhere that partially offset this, but there's no need to upgrade all that often.
  - gred 1y ago
    > less than 10% improvement year-over-year. That will feel like "stagnant"... Especially when, in that same time frame, your code editor / mail client / instant messaging / conference call / container management / source code control / password manager software all migrate to Electron...
  - DrNosferatu 1y ago
    It’s actually just 7% improvements year over year!
1y ago

diminish 1y ago

Multi-core operations like compiling C/C++ could benefit. Single thread performance of 16-core AMD Ryzen 9 9950X is only 1.8x of my poor and old laptop's 4-core i5 performance. https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/6211vs3830vs3947/AMD-Ryzen-9-9950X-vs-Intel-i5-1135G7-vs-Intel-i7-11700 https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/6211vs3830vs3947/AMD-Ry... I'm waiting for >1024 core ARM desktops, with >1TB of unified gpu memory to be able to run some large LLMs with Ping me when some builds this :)

zh3 1y ago
Yes, just went from i3770 (12 years old!) to a 9900x as I tend to wait for a doubling of single core performance before upgrading (got through a lot of PCs in the 386/486 era!). It's actually only 50% faster according to cpubenchmark [0] but is twice as fast in local usage (multithread is reported about 3 times faster). Also got a Mac Mini M4 recently and that thing feels slow in comparison to both these systems - likely more of a UI/software thing (only use M4 for xcode) than being down to raw CPU performance. [0] https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-i9-9900K-vs-Intel-i7-3770/ https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-i9-9900K-vs-Intel...
- fmajid 1y ago
  M4 is amazing hardware held up by a sub-par OS. One of the biggest bottlenecks when compiling software on a Mac is notarization, where every executable you compile causes a HTTP call to Apple. In addition to being a privacy nightmare, this causes the configure step in autoconf based packages to be excruciatingly slow.
  - gentooflux 1y ago
    They added always-connected DRM to software development, neat
    - fmajid 1y ago
      Exactly. They had promised to make notarization opt-out but reneged.

userbinator 1y ago

I wish developers, and I'm saying this as one myself, were forced to work on a much slower machine, to flush out those who can't write efficient code. Software bloat has already gotten worse by at least an order of magnitude in the past decade.

zh3 1y ago
Develop on a fast machine, test and optimise on a slow one?
mft_ 1y ago
I came here to say exactly this. If developers are frustrated by compilation times on last-generation hardware, maybe take a critical look at the code and libraries you're compiling. And as a siblimg comment notes, absolutely all testing should be on older hardware, without question, and I'd add with deliberately lower-quality and -speed data connections, too.
- sweetjuly 1y ago
  This is one of the things which cheeses me the most about LLVM. I can't build LLVM on less than 16GB of RAM without it swapping to high heaven (and often it just gets OOM killed anyways). You'd think that LLVM needing >16GB to compile itself would be a signal to take a look at the memory usage of LLVM but, alas :)
  - jcranmer 1y ago
    The thing that causes you run out of memory isn't actually anything in LLVM, it's all in ld. If you're building with debugging info, you end up pulling in all of the debug symbols for deduplication purposes during linking, and that easily takes up a few GB. Now link a dozen small programs in parallel (because make -j) and you've got an OOM issue. But the linker isn't part of LLVM itself (unless you're using lld), so there's not much that LLVM can do about it. (If you're building with ninja, there's a cmake option to limit the parallelism of the link tasks to avoid this issue).
1y ago

gnfargbl 1y ago

OK, I'm convinced. Can someone tell me what to buy, specifically? Needs to run Ubuntu, support 2 x 4K monitors (3 would be nice), have at least 64GB RAM and fit on my desk. Don't particularly care how good the GPU is / is not. Here's my starting point: gmktec.com/products/amd-ryzen™-ai-max-395-evo-x2-ai-mini-pc. Anything better?

zh3 1y ago
Multimonitor with 4K tends to need fast GPU just for the bandwidth, else dragging large windows around can feel quite slow (found that out running 3 x 4K monitors on a low-end GPU).
mft_ 1y ago
Huh, that's a really good deal at 1500 USD for the 64Gb model considering the processor it's running. (It's the same one that's in the Framework desktop that there's been lots of noise about recently - lots of recent reviews on YouTube.) Get the 128Gb model for (currently) 1999 USD and you can play with running big local LLMs too. The 8060 iGPU is roughly equivalment to a mid-level nVidia laptop GPU, so it's plenty to deal with a normal workload, and some decent gaming or equivalent if needed.
- gnfargbl 1y ago
  Yeah, I like the look of the Framework but the (relative) price and lead times are putting me off a little. There are also these which look similar https://www.bee-link.com/products/beelink-gtr9-pro-amd-ryzen-ai-max-395 https://www.bee-link.com/products/beelink-gtr9-pro-amd-ryzen...
  - arp242 1y ago
    From what I've been able to tell from interwebz reviews, the Framework one is better/faster as the GMTek is thermally throttled more. Dunno about the Beelink.
fmajid 1y ago
Beelink GTR9 Pro. It has dual 10G Ethernet interfaces. And get the 128GB RAM version, the RAM is not upgradeable. It isn't quite shipping yet, though. The absolute best would be a 9005 series Threadripper, but you will easily be pushing $10K+. The mainstream champ is the 9950X but despite being technically a mobile SOC the 395 gets you 90% of the real world performance of a 9950X in a much smaller and power efficient computer: https://www.phoronix.com/review/amd-ryzen-ai-max-arrow-lake/11 https://www.phoronix.com/review/amd-ryzen-ai-max-arrow-lake/...

blueflow 1y ago

Dunno. I got a Ryzen 7 with 16 cores from 2021 and the modern web still doesn't render smoothly. Maybe its not the hardware?

mft_ 1y ago
As an alternative anecdote, I've got a Ryzen 7 5800X from 2021, and it's stil blazingly fast for just about everything I throw at it...
ofalkaed 1y ago
Right now I am on my ancient cheap laptop with some 4 core intel and hard drive noises, the only time it has issues with webpages is when I have too many tabs open for its 4gigs of ram. My current laptop which is a 16 core Rhyzen 7 from about 2021 (x13) has never had an issue and I have yet to have too many tabs open on it. I think you might be having a OS/browser issue. As an aside, being on my old laptop with its hard drive, can't believe how slow life was before SSDs. I am enjoying listening to the hard drive work away and I am surprised to realize that I missed it.
dahart 1y ago
Maybe, but I can’t repro. Do you have a GPU? What browser? What web site? How much RAM do you have, and how much is available? What else is running on your machine? What OS, and is it a work machine with corporate antivirus?

jgb1984 1y ago

Specifically: buy a good desktop computer. I couldn't imagine working on a laptop several hours per day (even with an external screen + keyboard + mouse you're still stuck with subpar performance).

Apreche 1y ago

Too bad it’s so hard to get a completely local dev environment these days. It hardly matter what CPU I have since all the intensive stuff happens on another computer.

alt227 1y ago
You dont run an IDE with indexing, error checking and code completion?
- porridgeraisin 1y ago
  vscode-server runs the LSP etc in the remote machine. The local machine is really just the UI.

furkansahin 1y ago

FWIW, my recent hn submission had a really good discussion on this very same topic. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44985323 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44985323

ezoe 1y ago

But, does your work constantly compile Linux kernel or encoding AES-256 more than 33GB/s?

sgarland 1y ago

Tangential: TIL you can compile the Linux kernel in < 1 minute (on top-spec hardware). Seems it’s been a while since I’ve done that, because I remember it being more like an hour or more.

bornfreddy 1y ago
I remember I was blown away by some machine that compiled it in ~45 minutes. Pentium Pro baby! Those were the days.
- sgarland 1y ago
  My memory must be faulty, then, because I was mostly building it on an Athlon XP 2000+, which is definitely a few generations newer than a Pentium Pro. I’m probably thinking of various other packages, since at the time I was all-in on Gentoo. I distinctly remember trying to get distcc running to have the other computers (a Celeron 333 MHz and Pentium III 550 MHz) helping out for overnight builds. Can’t say that I miss that, because I spent more time configuring, troubleshooting, and building than using, but it did teach me a fair amount about Linux in general, and that’s definitely been worth it.
  - kelnos 1y ago
    Linux kernel compilation time depends heavily on what you're compiling though. You can have wildly different compilation times just by enabling or disabling some drivers or subsystems.
    - machomaster 1y ago
      Let's also not forget that kernel was not stagnant, but grew a lot over the years.
      - kelnos 1y ago
        Also true! Hard to say which was moving faster, though: CPU speed increases & RAM amount increase, or the additional code and complexity written into the kernel.

miiiiiike 1y ago

Depends on the workload. I spent a few grand building a new machine with a 24-core CPU. And, while my gcc Docker builds are MUCH faster, the core Angular app still builds a few seconds slower than on my years old MacBook Pro. Even with all of my libraries split into atoms, built with Turbo, and other optimizations. 6-10 seconds to see a CSS change make its way from the editor to the browser is excruciating after a few hours, days, weeks, months, and years.

renewiltord 1y ago
Web development is crazy. Went from a Java/C codebase to a webdev company using TS. The latter would take minutes to build. The former would build in seconds and you could run a simulated backtest before the web app would be ready. It blew my mind. Truly this is more complicated than trading software.
- thunderfork 1y ago
  A lot of this seems to have gotten a lot better with esbuild for me, at least, and maybe tsgo will be another big speed-up once it's done...
- Tade0 1y ago
  For this reason the TypeScript 7 compiler will be written in Go. That won't help Angular, because its design doesn't lend itself to such speedups. The compiler produces a change detector function for every reactive structure such a class field, so the final app is necessarily huge.
- anthk 1y ago
  No ccache?

feelamee 1y ago

more generally - it is worth it to pay for a good developer experience. It's not exactly about the CPU. As you compared build times - it is worth it to make a build faster. And, happily, often you don't need new CPU for this.

syngrog66 1y ago

"You should buy a faster CPU" is the post's actual title. And an evergreen bit of advice. Nothing new to see here, kids, please move along!

npn 1y ago

I find it crazy that some people only use a single laptop for their dev work. Meanwhile I have 3 PCs, 5 monitors, keyboards and mouses, and still think they are not enough. There are a lot of jobs that should run in a home server running 24/7 instead of abusing your poor laptop. Remote dedicated servers work, but the latency is killing your productivity, and it is pricey if you want a server with a lot of disk space.

callc 1y ago
I was away from my regular desktop dev PC for multiple months recently and only used a crappy laptop for dev work. I got used to it pretty quickly. This makes me remember so many years ago starting to program on a dual core plastic MacBook. Also, I’m very impressed by one of my coworkers working on 13 inch laptop only. Extremely smart. A bigger guy so I worry about his posture and RSI on such a small laptop. TLDR I think more screen space does not scale near linearly with productivity
crazygringo 1y ago
I dunno, alt+tab works as fast for me as moving my head to look at another monitor. And I'm not particularly concerned with "abusing" my laptop. I paid for its chips and all of its cores, I'm not going to not use them...
- npn 1y ago
  it is not about the chips or cores. it is about the pcie ssd that you torture it with high temperature for a long period of time due to a laptop poor cooling. or the battery, it does not like high temperature either. you only regret it when it happens. and it will happen.
  - crazygringo 1y ago
    > and it will happen. I dunno... I've been doing this a long time. And haven't had any of the failures you're talking about. You're aware these machines throttle performance as necessary to prevent from getting too hot?

the__alchemist 1y ago

Tangent: IMO top tier CPU is a no brainer if you play games, run performance-sensitive software (molecular dynamics or w/e), or compile code. Look at GPU purchasing. It's full of price games, stock problems, scalpers, 3rd party boards with varying levels of factory overclock, and unreasonable prices. CPU is a comparative cake walk: go to Amazon or w/e, and buy the one with the highest numbers in its name.

jandrese 1y ago
It’s not quite that simple. Often the most expensive chips trade off raw clock speed for more cores, which can be counterproductive if your game only uses 4 threads.
AnotherGoodName 1y ago
For games its generally not worthwhile since the performance is almost entirely based on gpu these days. Almost all build guides will say ‘get midrange cpu X over high end chip Y and put the savings to a better GPU’. Consoles in particular are just a decent gpu with a fairly low end cpu these days. The xbox one with a 1.75Ghz 8core AMD from a couple of generations ago now is still playing all the latest games.
- the__alchemist 1y ago
  Anecdote: I got a massive performance (FPS) improvement in games after upgrading CPU recently, with no GPU change. I think currently, that build guide doesn't apply based on what's going on with GPUs. Was valid in the past, and will be valid in the future, I hope!
  - ak217 1y ago
    How old was your previous CPU? Different people have vastly different expectations when it comes to upgrading. I'm certain I can play all of the games that I'm interested in on my 3 year old Ryzen 7600x, and that I'm limited by the 5 year old GPU (which I dread upgrading because of the crunch). Would someone with a 5 year old CPU be well served by upgrading to a 9600x, absolutely. But some people think they have to upgrade their Threadripper every year. (As far as work goes, I realize this directly contradicts the OP's point, which is the intent. If you know your workflow involves lots of compiling and local compute, absolutely buy a recent Threadripper. I find that most of the time the money spent on extra cores would be better spent on a more modest CPU with more RAM and a faster SSD. And more thoughtful developer tooling that doesn't force me to recompile the entire Rust work tree and its dependencies with every git pull.)

Joel_Mckay 1y ago

Like so many things it depends on the use-case... If you are gaming... than high core count chips like Epyc CPUs can actually perform worse in Desktops, and is a waste of money compared to Ryzen 7/Ryzen 9 X3D CPUs. Better to budget for the best motherboard, ram, and GPU combo supported by a specific application test-ranked CPU. In general, a value AMD GPU can perform well if you just play games, but Nvidia rtx cards are the only option for many CUDA applications. Check your model numbers, as marketers ruined naming conventions: https://opendata.blender.org/ https://opendata.blender.org/ https://www.cpubenchmark.net/multithread/ https://www.cpubenchmark.net/multithread/ https://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html https://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html Best of luck, we have been in the "good-enough" computing age for some time =3

shmerl 1y ago

Depends on what you need, but it's totally worth it if you want to spend less time say on compiling stuff. Video processing, compression, games and etc. Anything computationally heavy directly benefits from it.

beezle 1y ago

When ever I've built a new desktop I've always gone near the top performance with some consideration given to cache and power consumption (remember when peeps cared about that? lol). From dual pentium pros to my current desktop - Xeon E3-1245 v3 @ 3.40GHz built with 32 GB top end ram in late 2012 which has only recently started to feel a little pokey, I think largely due to cpu security mitigations added to Windows over the years. So that extra few hundred up front gets me many years extra on the backend.

ocdtrekkie 1y ago
I think people overestimate the value of a little bump in performance. I recently built a gaming PC with a 9700X. The 9800X3D is drastically more popular, for an 18% performance bump on benchmarks but double the power draw. I rarely peg my CPU, but I am always drawing power. Higher power draw means it runs hotter, and it stresses the power supply and cooling systems more. I'd rather go a little more modest for a system that's likely to wear out much, much slower.
- rafaelmn 1y ago
  Is it really 2x or is it 2x at max load ? Since, as you say, you're not peggig the CPU - would be interesting to compare power usage on a task basis and the duration. Could be that the 3D cache is really adding that much overhead even to idle CPU. Anyway I've never regretted buying a faster CPU (GPU is a different story, burned some money there on short time window gains that were marginally relevant), but I did regret saving on it (going with M4 air vs M4 pro)
  - msk-lywenn 1y ago
    I recently had some fun overclocking my old i5 4690. IIRC, running the base frequency at 3.9Ghz instead of 3.5GHz, yield a very modest performance boost but added 20% more power consumption and temperature. I then underclocked it to 3.1Ghz and the thing barely ran at more than 40°C under load and power consumption was super low! The performance was more than mediocre though...

nchmy 1y ago

What's with the post title being completely incongruent with the article title? Moreover, I'm pretty sure this was not the case when it was first posted...

burnt-resistor 1y ago

Never buy the fastest new, always the 2nd~4th fastest, preferably used.

bullen 1y ago

Is it worth to keep your old CPU? I still run a 6600 (65W peak) from 2016 as my daily driver. I have replaced the SSD once (MLC lasted 5 years, hopefully forever with SLC drive from 2011?), 2x 32GB DDR4 sticks (Kingston Micron lasted 8 years, with aliexpress "samsung" sticks for $50 a pop) and Monitor (Eizo FlexScan 1932 lasted 15! years RIP with Eizo RadiForce 191M, highly recommend with f.lux/redshift for exceptional quality of image without blue light) It's still powerful enough to play any games released this year I throw at it at 60 FPS (with a low profile 3050 from 2024) let alone compile any bloat. Keep your old CPU until it breaks, completely... or actually until the motherboard breaks; I have a Kaby Lake 35W replacement waititng for the 6600 to die.

chupasaurus 1y ago
You could buy a SSD with SLC cache that is bigger than in 2011 pure SLC one, and probably cheaper.
- bullen 1y ago
  We have gone through this if you look at my comment history. Yes you can do everything, but not without added complexity, that will end up failing faster. We have peaked in all tech. Nothing will ever get as good as the raw peak in longevity: - SSDs ~2011 (pure SLC) - RAM ~2013 (DDR3 fast low latency but low Hz = cooler = lasts longer) - CPUs ~2018 (debatable but I think those will outlast everything else)
  - moffkalast 1y ago
    I'd expect every new generation of computers to not last as long as the last one, we keep reducing the transistor size and that means more fragility. I'm half surprised modern GPUs make it through shipping without melting from static. My guess is that the most long lived computer gen could be one that still uses through hole components. Not a very useful machine by any metric though I bet.
    - aftbit 1y ago

a3w 1y ago

I do not care if my CPU is 10 years old. Everything is instant anyway.

qalmakka 1y ago

I bought one too. It's bananas how powerful the R9 9950X is. And it runs great with a €40 Thermalright cooler too - no need for AIO liquid cooling! It's amazing how great AMD CPUs got.

kelnos 1y ago

The new top of the line CPU might only cost $500, but even if you have a Framework laptop with replaceable parts, the new top-of-the-line mainboard is going to cost you north of $1k. If you don't, you're probably talking about a new $2k+ full laptop purchase. And I don't want a desktop. But I would agree that, when you are purchasing that new laptop (or mainboard), you get the best that you can afford. Pushing your upgrade cycle out even just one year can save you a lot of money, while still getting the performance you need.

joshka 1y ago

At my former job at a FAANG, I did the math on allocating developers machines with 16GB vs 64GB based on actual job tasks with estimates of how much thumb twiddling waiting time that this would save and then multiplied that out by the cost of the developer's time. The cost benefit showed a reasonable ROI that was realized in Weeks for Senior dev salaries (months for juniors). Based on this, I strongly believe that if you're providing hardware for software engineers, it rarely if ever makes sense to buy anything but the top spec Macbook Pro available, and to upgrade every 2-3 years. I can't comment on non desktop / non-mac scenarios or other job families. YMMV.

svantana 1y ago
No doubt the math checks out, but I wonder if developer productivity can be quantified that easily. I believe there's a lot of research pointing to people having a somewhat fixed amount of cognitive capacity available per day, and that aligns well with my personal experience. A lot of times, waiting for the computer to finish feels like a micro-break that saves up energy for my next deep thought process.
- CamouflagedKiwi 1y ago
  Well depends what kind of time periods you're talking. I've seen one in the past that was 60 minutes vs. 20 minutes (for a full clean compile, but often that is where you find yourself) - that is far more than a micro-break, that is a big chunk of time wasted.
- arcfour 1y ago
  Simple estimates work surprisingly well for a lot of things because a lot of the 'unquantifiable' complexity being ignored behaves like noise. When you have dozens of factors pulling in different directions—some developers multitask better, some lose flow more easily, some codebases are more memory-hungry, and so on—it all tends to just average out, and the result is reasonably accurate. Accurate enough that it's useful data to make a decision with, at least.
  - 1y ago

vondur 1y ago

I suppose it depends on the programming tasks you do. If you are working on stuff like recompiling large codebases all day- then yes, a fast CPU and and lots of RAM will really help. If you are working more on scripting stuff, then maybe the fastest CPU isn't really needed, rather more RAM. I just bought myself a Ryzen 9950x deal from a local Microcenter. I will run handbrake on ripped files which this CPU is really good at.

nazgul17 1y ago
I worked on a Spring Boot application that would take more than a minute to start. Not Spring's fault, IIUC, but nevertheless a focus killer.
- MBCook 1y ago
  A minute? What was taking so long? Spring itself is only a few seconds (as you said that’s not the issue). That sounds horrible to work on.
  - olavgg 1y ago
    If you have many beans that does IO, startup will be slower. For example, just removing sql/database initialization can shave off a second.

theYipster 1y ago

My 5 year old Threadripper with 128GB RAM is still going strong. A 9950x would probably be faster (especially for single thread,) but moving to AM5 would be a massive downgrade on IO. Can't really see spending $10K now for a TRX50 or WRX90 build... Maybe when Zen 6 Threadrippers come out.

WarOnPrivacy 1y ago

There are peaks in long-term CPU value. That is, CPUs that are 1) performant enough to handle general purpose computing for a decade and 2) outperform later chips for a long time. The i7-4770 was one. It reliably outperformed later Intel CPUs until near 10th gen or so. I know shops that are still plugging away on them. The first comparable replacements for it is the i7-12700 (but the i5-12400 is a good buy). At 13th gen, Intel swaps E for P cores. They have their place but I still prefer 12th gen for new desktops. Past all that, the author is right about the AMD Ryzen 9950x. It's a phenomenal chip. I used one in a friend's custom build (biz, local llm) and it'll be in use in 2035.

mwpmaybe 1y ago
> The i7-4770 was one. It reliably outperformed later Intel CPUs until near 10th gen or so. Per which benchmarks? > At 13th gen, Intel swaps E for P cores. One nit, Intel started adding (not swapping) E-cores to desktop parts with 12th gen, but i3 parts and most i5 parts were spared. More desktop i5 parts got them as starting with 13th gen.
zozbot234 1y ago
What's wrong with E cores? They're the best bang for the buck for both baseline low-power usage (and real-world systems are idle a lot of the time) and heavy multicore workloads. An E-core cluster takes a tiny fraction of area and power compared to a P-core, so it's not just a one-on-one comparison.

dbg31415 1y ago

It's worth paying for reliability. If that also means more speed, fine -- but raw CPU benchmarks rarely matter outside of very specific workloads. What you'll notice day to day is whether the machine crashes, wipes out a project, or forces you into an unexpected week of downtime. Computers are like lightbulbs, and laptops are the extra fragile kind. They burn out. I've never had one more than five years, and after year three I just assume it could fail at any moment -- whether it's an SSD crash, a swollen battery, or drivers breaking after the next OS update. If you replace machines every three years, like I do, you're not necessarily paying for performance -- you're really just paying for peace of mind.

nipperkinfeet 1y ago

I'm still using the same CPU I had 15 years ago. It's an AMD Phenom II X6 1090T. The only upgrades I've made are increasing the RAM to 16 GB and replacing the hard drive with an SSD. It continues to meet all my needs.

tyleo 1y ago

Oh this is fun. My company recently did a garage sale on old hardware and I intend to post something similar compiling across 4 different hardwares and 4 different languages. I’m including some M series Macs in the mix though because the main motivation behind me doing this is how astonishing even their mobile performance is.

Havoc 1y ago

I suspect for most a faster SSD is probably the better bet

credit_guy 1y ago

My explanation:corporations want to benefit from scale. That means lots of computers with identical specs. Not only everyone gets the same machine, they get the same machine for many years. It's not unthinkable for a spec to stay constant for 5 years. In exchange for this stability, the makers of the machines (Dell, HP) can lower the price significantly. As a corporation you can buy a very powerful machine for something that a regular consumer needs to pay about twice the price. But that's when the spec is new. As years pass, a machine with the same spec gets to be downright sluggish.

deleted 1y ago

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dlevine 1y ago

Something I find weird is that this article compares a 9950x with two different laptop CPUs and concludes that performance has increased massively in the past few years. If you compare the 9950x with its two Desktop predecessors (released 2 and 4 years before), you see about a 6% increase from the 7950x and a 45% increase from the 5950x. So you should consider upgrading regularly, but potentially not every single generation. I think it makes sense to consider the performance and offer an upgrade when you see a 50% or so cumulative improvement. Everywhere I have worked has upgraded developers every 3-4 years, and it might make sense to upgrade if there is a massive change (like when Macbooks went to M-series). As for Desktop vs Laptop, that is relevant too. Desktops are typically much faster than Laptops because they are allowed much larger power envelopes, which leads to more cores and higher clock speeds for sustained periods of time. However, there is always a question as to whether your use case will be able to use all 16/32 cores/threads in a 9950X CPU. If not, you may not notice much difference with a smaller processor. Source for CPU benchmarks: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/6211vs5031vs3862vs5717/AMD-Ryzen-9-9950X-vs-AMD-Ryzen-9-7950X-vs-AMD-Ryzen-9-5950X-vs-Intel-i9-14900K https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/6211vs5031vs3862vs5717/...

tucnak 1y ago

On a different note. I just bought a Sienna-series EPYC, which is a 48-core Zen 4c chip capped at 200W. AMD 8434PN at 1200 EUR price-point. My understanding is it's a two- or three years out-of-date CPU, but I was simply blown away! I contemplated purchasing a 9005-class CPU, but even 32-core variant would cost more than 3000 EUR... at sommat crazy like 400W. Thank you, my PCIe stuff alone draws a kilowatt; no way I'm putting in a 400W CPU on top.

raudette 1y ago

My issue with corporate laptops isn't so much the PC's hardware but the antimalware. I'm not even sure what the antimalware does, and I think, at one time or another, I've probably had all the major ones installed, and they've all managed to slow down my PC down to frustratingly slow speeds.

msarrel 1y ago

It almost never makes sense to buy the fastest CPU.

1vuio0pswjnm7 1y ago

Blog post only mentions CPU whilst comments responding to it change subject to RAM and storage

k4rli 1y ago

JS ~~devs~~ writers keep managing to make their bloatware run slow even on highend hardware. Ryzen 9 7900x + 128GB ram + 6900XT + arch yet Cursor IDE still manages to be incredibly slow and freezing up after re-focusing. Even base VSCodium is many times faster than that. I can have AAA game + kernel build + 100 Firefox tabs active at the same time, yet a piece of JS makes the hardware seem garbage.

4gotunameagain 1y ago
Hey, don't call them devs. They are software engineers. They engineer that 8MB javascript page.

thewileyone 1y ago

Laptop yes cause you can't change it. Desktop maybe if the cost is within your budget. I always recommend people set an honest limit to what they're willing to spend and buy the best that limit can afford.