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by matthewmacleod 2702 days ago
Nothing about your post adds up.

That's great, but I'm literally sitting at my desk doing it just now, so I can assure you it's not just made up!

2015 MB i7 to i9 MB doesn't increase anything times 4.

i5 2015 13" MBP to i9 2018 15" MBP. 3x the cores, higher IPC, higher frequency, faster memory, faster SSD. It adds up, and for this class of process a 4x improvement is totally reasonable.

How long have you been working on that task and waited an hour? The wasted labour cost might have bought you a dedicated compiling rack 2 weeks in.

I don't know how the hell you work, but I don't just kick off a process and let it run while I sit still at my desk waiting for it to complete :) It just involves working to a slightly different rhythm, and the ability to iterate a bit faster makes that nicer for me, at minimal cost.

Anyway… wasn't the point that "developers don't need faster machines?" I think buying a "dedicated compiling rack" would count!

How long could you have rented cloud ressources to bring that task down to close to instant for the cost of a i9 MB?

No idea, but in the long term, more than it costs to buy a new development machine. Plus this way I don't have to fanny around with copying assets back and forward, remoting in to visualise things, setting up a server or whatever. And the new laptop makes everything a little bit faster and more enjoyable to use. The price of the machine is pretty marginal for a tool I use in excess of 40 hours a week.

Beware if you fully utilise a laptop like you describe shouldn't it become useless for everything else while doing that?

Nah, it's fine generally. Everything's just a bit slower until it's done.

1 comments

Faster is usually better but it's worth pointing out: If a task took a whole day, you wouldn't burn the day twiddling your thumbs - you'd context switch and do something else. You'd save long compilation steps to late day so that you could come back tomorrow, not wasting time. For many people, 15 minutes is not worth switching but 1 hour wait time is.
Recently got access to a new HW platform with 256 cores CPU, 512M of L3, 512G/1TB of RAM. The speed of that thing compiling the linux kernel and run certain AI testing are amazing. One can try out different experiments so much faster.

Used to working diff company with server farms for compiling. Even with the servers, compiling the 26G software pkg took 4 hours. When it is high noon and everyone was using it. I have seen compile jobs can last 8+ hours. There a few times that by the time compile is done, I have completely context switch out and forgot what I need to debug.