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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
* "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.
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.
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.
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.
Efficiency costs development time and thus money. Computers getting faster is what made software development cheaper and possible to use for solving problems.
Usually software gets developed to be so fast that people just barely accept it with the computers of their time. You can do better by setting explicit targets like the RAIL model by google. Optimizing any further usually is just a waste of resources.
i work as a mid-level engg with a 4+ yo dell (handed down to me when i joined), which is the same generic laptop that someone from admin team receives. some of my colleagues also share similar specs, and we were yet to be lucky to be given an upgrade.
might be down to the tech culture here, but we don't automatically write the most efficient code either. for a lot of simple projects, these "bad" machines are still capable enough unfortunately.
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?
You might be better off buying a mini pc if you’re happy with an integrated GPU. There are plenty of Ryzen mini pcs that end up cheaper than building around an itx motherboard.
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).
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.
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[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 86.3 ms ] threadI 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
You do need a good SSD though. There is a new generation of pcie5 SSDs that came out that seems like it might be quite a bit faster.
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.
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?
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.
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
I wish that were true, but the current Ryzen 9950 is maybe 50% faster than the two generations older 5950, at compilation workloads.
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.
* "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.
This is an "office" CPU. Workstation CPUs are called Epyc.
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.
> 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/
[1] https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus
„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?
But I would never say no to a faster CPU!
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.
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-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 :)
Usually software gets developed to be so fast that people just barely accept it with the computers of their time. You can do better by setting explicit targets like the RAIL model by google. Optimizing any further usually is just a waste of resources.
might be down to the tech culture here, but we don't automatically write the most efficient code either. for a lot of simple projects, these "bad" machines are still capable enough unfortunately.
Here's my starting point: gmktec.com/products/amd-ryzen™-ai-max-395-evo-x2-ai-mini-pc. Anything better?
You might be better off buying a mini pc if you’re happy with an integrated GPU. There are plenty of Ryzen mini pcs that end up cheaper than building around an itx motherboard.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44985323