Yes. I work on a Linux distro, and the amount of time my 1st gen 32 core Threadripper has saved me is truly mind blowing. It made it possible to do changes I wouldn't have dreamed of.

As an example, I worked a bunch on our PostgreSQL infrastructure, but we support 5 years of versions. So you have to CI/integrate your changes and test them across all 5 versions, every time you test. My machine could do this on the order of 2-3 minutes -- recompiling everything from scratch every time, and running all integration tests on all versions. There's no CI system or cost-effective cloud hardware that would have given me turnaround like that. In the end I was doing hundreds of builds over the course of just a few days.

In contrast, at $WORK we have a C codebase that takes < 1 minute to compile on my 4 core work laptop. YMMV.

Why not a dedicated CI server with all this power and a more modest and cheap workstation?

Because then you need to commit your chnges, push to a remote Git repo, wait for the CI server to check for changes, wait for the CI server to finish previously scheduled builds, wait for CI server to start building, ...

Also, all that needs to be set up. If you need to change some little thing, you're much faster doing it locally, rather than trying to wrap your head around the build server configuration and figure out how to just run this one test different but only for this branch and not for the normal builds ...

How's kernel support and VM support such as QEMU lately? I'm thinking to buy i7 for embedded OS dev but that sounds very tempting. I heard AMD CPUs had some breaking issues last year.

There was breaking issue, but it didn't manifest automatically.

It happened, when the 2nd gen TR arrived. It used the same mainboards, so all the manufacturers issued BIOS updates.

Unfortunately, these updates claimed to support SEV (Secure Encrypted Virtualization). Linux of course tried to initialize it at boot/module load time and the entire thing went hanging, because TR CPUs do not support SEV, only EPYCs do.

So there were the following fixes:

1) downgrade BIOS back to pre-TR2 version,

2) blacklist the ccp module; which would make kvm_amd non-functional,

3) wait for a fix in Linux kernel, which initializes SEV with a timeout.

So it wasn't that tragic issue, if you had first gen TR.

I haven't had any issues with my 1st gen Threadripper for about a year now. I'm running Unraid with QEMU from that box and couldn't be happier with performance and reliability whilst running 2-5 VMs at once along with 20+ Docker containers. No issues with Windows 10 and *nix VMs; I haven't been brave enough to attempt a hackintosh yet though.

When it was bad, it was so bad. I never wanted to know as much as I do now about IOMMU groups and PCIe lanes.

I use an 8-core iMac Pro with 64GB RAM; it’s wonderful.

When I bought it I was doing some embedded device work involving a Windows VM, as well as heavy web dev on a frontend JS app and a backend app with tons of Chrome tabs open. All these things crave memory, and my 16GB MacBook Pro was swapping itself to death. This was pre-32GB MacBook Pros, so I bit the bullet and couldn’t be happier with the setup. It’s dead silent basically no matter what I do and doesn’t get thermally throttled during heavy workloads. Having the extra RAM also makes a huge difference.

Now that I’m doing more regular web dev on an Elixir & React app, I benefit from the 16x parallel compilation & test suite, as well as the ability to keep basically anything open without resource issues.

I have a similarly specced iMac Pro and I use it for very similar tasks. Could not be happier with the machine. I think the RAM + the very speedy storage make this a great choice for the kind of dev work I do.

I do similar work (arguably a bit more intensive) on my 2016 MBP with the lowest specs possible (8gb ram, 2ghz cpu) and it's surprisingly silent most if not all the time.

I have around 5-6 windows with 10-15 tabs each within them as well some ssh tunnels and some other applications open (I do heavy front/backend with docker builds through ssh as well as ML work through ssh)

Not sure what's going on, but my lowest-end Mac is running everything I need like butter.

I got a Lenovo laptop with roughly the same specs, though.

Your Lenovo laptop has an 8 core 3.2GHz Xeon with 4.2GHz Turbo Boost, 19MB Cache, 64GB DDR4, silent cooling even under heavy load (which it can sustain), and an SSD that does 1700MB/s with full disk encryption?

Actually, P53 and P73 can be specced with all of those - and more. Up to 128GB RAM, Quadro graphics, 3 drive slots/bays (2 NvME, 1 2.5")...And the chassis is not compromised for thinness, so cooling is adequate.

I'm thinking of getting either a P1 or a P53 for my next work upgrade. The P53 will likely have better thermals, but the P1 has an option to remove the discrete GPU, and just use the integrated GPU. As I have no need for a fancy GPU, I figure it would reduce unnecessary power draw.

Forgot to add - and you get a decent display, and it's portable, and it's still cheaper than MP.

And, as an added bonus, you can have major shoulder problems for life from lugging that 17" behemoth around.

Hah, I agree...But, on the other hand, you can carry it when needed, and I do regret not buying one of those for work instead of Razer Blade, "because it's thin and light" - it gets overly hot and noisy when doing heavier work and is definitely not up to par to these...

What operating system does it come with?

I think Lenovo (together with other questionable actions that alienate their userbase) removed the option to choose Linux for workstations, so it comes only with Windows 10. But Thinkpads are traditionally very well supported on various Linux distributions.

Not at my laptop until monday so not sure about all details, but almost that, yes. It's a top specced P1. Xeon but 6 cores I think. 64gb ddr4. 1500mb/s read I think it was on the SSD.

Not silent, exactly though, hehe.

Wow, that’s a beast of a laptop. I just configured one and the cost isn’t all that different from my 18mo old iMac Pro :) I have to imagine that the battery life isn’t great given the non-mobile parts, and that it must weigh a ton?

I’m enjoying the combo of a powerful workstation where I work most of the time, and then a thin & light portable device for when I need portability. For me that combo works well and hits the right trade offs, especially the silence I get to enjoy.

I’m also remembering that Apple ships the same SSD setup in the newer MacBook Pro machines, which weren’t yet out when I bought this iMac Pro. Definitely nothing unique or unusual about that speed anymore!

Yeah, not cheap, but my company let me choose between that and a top of the line macbook, and since my previous macbook was a catastrophy I switched setup entirely.

The weight isn't too bad, I have it in my backpack commuting by bike in hilly Norway. But maybe too heavy for a shoulder bag. The battery time is useless, yes, so that's the big tradeoff. But since I bike instead of commuting by train or so, I never used my previous laptop not plugged in anyway.

I don't think the P1 is all that heavy. Maybe 4lbs?

That ~1700MB/s FDE speed is a limit coming from Intel AES support. The drives themselves (assuming NVMe, 4 PCIe gen3 lanes) are faster.

Even those crippled by being connected to two lanes can achieve this speed.

I just upgraded from a 2700X to a 3900X. Maybe it’s not quite HEDT but its closer, and my god, it’s literally mind blowing. I measured a 47% wall clock improvement on a test compilation. If you compile lots of C++ you are in for some serious surprises. Especially so if you are doing things that cross-cut hundreds of C++ packages at once, it basically enables things that aren’t possible on, say, a mid range laptop.

That said, if you are just running simple Go or Rust compilations, or small single-package C++ compilations, caching and a decent processor should be good enough, and you probably won’t benefit much from a lot of threads. (You may want it for your Webpack builds still ;)

One tip: scale up your RAM, pay attention to clocks and latency relative to your processor (especially with AMD where it really matters.) 16 GB is easy to kill when you are running 24 instances of GCC and a VM or two.

Rust actually benefits a lot from more threads once you have a couple of dependencies. A personal project using amethyst/nalgebra dropped its compile time for a fresh release build from 20 minutes to 2 when I upgraded from a i5-4670k to a r9 3900x.

This is true; I’ve never worked on a huge Rust project, only fairly large C++ projects (at home, anyways.) Rust compilations always felt fast enough to not matter, similar to Go, although maybe not quite that fast. (With Go, it never felt to slow to say, build Kubernetes from scratch; it’s just fast.)

Regarding webpack builds... absolutely NVME, when I went from SSD to NVME it's the Node/webpack build times that I really noticed the performance differences.

I would think the extra cpu would be more of an impact with Rust than even C++... I wouldn't know, running a 3600 as a place holder until the 3950X comes out. I couldn't handle the 4790K anymore, going from 32gb to 64gb and the couple extra cores made a huge difference for my docker/vm workflows. Can't wait for the 3950x. I'm sure the TR 3rd gen will be similarly impressive with the changes to IO.

Oh yeah, NVMe is an absolute given. It only took one NVMe drive experience and I have never had a desktop or laptop since without a large NVMe SSD as the boot and primary disk. It is in many cases a substantial boost and you can benefit across more things than a bigger CPU since many things these days are IO bound to begin with!

I’m rocking a Samsung 970 Pro 512 GB on my desktop. I never thought I’d need more space than that, since I can always use my NAS or the spare spinning disk I have installed. But, the more CPU power you have, the more you can feed it... I find myself building entire fragments of Nixpkgs now and it takes substantial disk space to do it.

I don't have an HEDT but an outdated Haswell i5 laptop (not an Ultra Low Voltage model at least, so it's quite fast). Last year I spotted a bug in Firefox and I though it was time to put a line in the contribution section in my resume.

The contribution experience was a nightmare because a full build of Firefox took 3 hrs and running the entire testing framework took 4 hrs, though it turned out that I needed to run only a part of the testing framework. Changing a single line and building it again still took more than 30 minutes.

That was the first moment that I wanted a HEDT in my life. It feels like devs who work with big C++ projects would want a bigger workstation because of the significant build time.

Maybe spin up an instance on GCE or EC2 and remote into it? If you live anywhere near a data center it should be under 50ms delay. Your time is certainly worth more than whatever the cost of the instance.

Probably. But I always try to build Linux programs natively or in an officially supported environment at the first attempt because I'm not sure what potentially cause problems when I build it in a something unsupported environment. On top of that running the testing framework needed an X11 environment. You know, it sometimes also takes significant times to figure out how to set up in a different environment. I might try EC2 if I became a regular firefox contributor.

> If you live anywhere near a data center it should be under 50ms delay.

Hm, I guess I don't live anywhere near a data center. 1M+ North American city, but lowest ping to any AWS/GCE region is ~130ms.

My RTT from the midwestern US to AWS/Azure/GCP in Germany is less than that. I think your ISP has more blame than your distance to the nearest zone in NA.

Yes, you guys are entirely correct, something looks fishy with my ISP. I'll give them a call them tomorrow morning if it still looks like this.

Edit: Now resolved, pings (barely) over 50ms.

Most likely that latency comes from the link between your place and your ISP.

New York to LA ping time is something like 70ms. Are you going through a proxy?

And it's much easier to set up a build env on a VM than local machine

Woof. I wasn't aware compilation times got that long for people who aren't building a whole OS.

Try building Chromium from source. Anandtech uses it as a multithreaded benchmark. The top CPUS can average just under an hour compile time.

https://www.anandtech.com/bench/CPU-2019/2224

I wouldn't try contributing if I were aware of it too lol. Imagine that I did it for Chromium. I was told that it takes about 20GB to build Chromium.

It's usually more, actually. We have seen 100+ GB build directories when building the "all" target and a non-GOMA build easily takes multiple hours on a desktop i7

A browser nowadays is pretty much a whole OS.

Hmm... Like when Oracle created their "bare metal" product. There just wasn't much left to add to the database engine to eliminate the need for a general-purpose operating system. I suspect graphics, audio, and pointing input may be significant barriers to doing the same thing here.

Well I work in games and building our thing without distributed compilation is inconceivable.

I remember building Mozilla took around 6 hours in my PC back around 2003. Though granted, that was a Pentium II PC with only 128MB of RAM and most of those hours were probably spent with the OS (Linux) swapping stuff :-P.

Are compile farm still relevant in these type of scenario these days?

Yes. As a CI pipeline the Firefox team do run their own compile farm called TryServer [1] and is building a various different versions (possibly all of accepted versions) at a time.

Level 1 contributors (contributors who are acknowledged by one of Mozilla dev) grant access to TryServer.

[1]: https://wiki.mozilla.org/ReleaseEngineering/TryServer

3 HOURS? Does that say more about your workstation or the project?

I've recently built php + most of the bundled extensions, in a VM (on a 2018 Mac mini) and it's only a couple of minutes at most to build.

Hey it's Firefox, one of the biggest C++ project you can build for now.

A modern browser is a MUCH larger codebase.

Well perhaps if browsers didn't try to cram every feature of a desktop operating system into their own runtime, it wouldn't be?

Seriously. Chrome and Firefox are both guilty of this.

Okay, support every CSS & JS DOM/API feature without doing so. Create your own browser, and get people to actually use it.

I do, and it makes a significant difference in most of my workloads. A lot of my work requires testing bleeding edge software, for example, applying a small patch to the latest version of kubernetes then running a small virtualized cluster locally to make sure it works.

Even if not for that, I tend to cross compile a lot of software since all the engineers at my company use macs for software development but we deploy to linux servers, so often I end up building rust binaries for linux and it's fairly computationally intense.

For an anecdote, on my work laptop (i9/32Gb/512SSD 2018 15" MBP) I can compile the dev environment from scratch in 40 minutes whereas it takes 4 hours on the company standard dual core/8gb/256gb 2015 13" macbook

I do, although not the kind of software development most people do.

I’m a robotics controls engineer. The code I write is pretty short compared to most of you, and it doesn’t take long to compile. But to test it I have to run very complicated dynamic simulations. These never run in realtime. It’s not uncommon for a thirty-second simulation to take five, ten, fifteen minutes to run; sometimes I have to run many iterations of the sam sim to collect valid statistics. So both CPU speed and number of cores translates directly to time spent waiting for the sim run to finish.

I have a 2013 trashcan Mac Pro with 12 cores. It’s still a good machine.

Oh yes, it makes a _huge_ difference. Most modern laptops use constrained, low power CPUs and GPUs. They are dog slow. Even my 5 year old desktop is substantially faster (like, builds take half the time kind of difference) compared to my <1 year old max spec'd thinkpad.

Possibly the only laptops that could compare to desktops are gaming laptops, and I know developers who buy things like the Razer gaming laptop to try and get desktop-like performance.

For me the problem with gaming laptops for work is their GPUs. I honestly don't need anything beyond build in Intel GPUs but I would love to have powerful CPU + a lot of RAM. Highend GPUs are driving prices of laptops very high so essentially I'm paying a lot for hardware that I would never use. That's why I prefer desktops, there is no problem with having Threadripper and 128GB of RAM in case with some basic $30 used GPU.

I think good GPUs are necessary to support external monitors. My thinkpad really struggles to power two external normal DPI monitors. If I had high DPI I don't think it would even be possible. I suspect the gaming laptops with their full powered GPUs, usually Nvidia or AMD, would have no problem powering several high DPI external monitors.

That's true but still you don't need Titan to power two 4k monitors, probably good old 750Ti or even older GPU will be enough. For me it's even easier because my sweet spot is one 1440p display (that's where I work most efficiently) so anything will be good enough for me.

It probably depends what sort of software.

I migrated from a MBP to a 2018 Mac mini with 64GB, and the ability to run say 10 VMs at once, without having to limit them to half a GB RAM each is amazing.

I'm not in the market when this thing (Mac Pro) is actually released but in a year or to, I may well be migrating to the latest of the Pro line - I don't care about GPU (much - it just needs to drive some displays) but I do care about CPU speed + core count, Memory and fast storage.

I do, I really like it. Current uptime, ~90 days, got everything the way I like it with i3... I can have hundreds of tabs open in various browsers, I've got 9 workspaces with various projects and things in them and a 4k display.

Actually my main rig is the last mac pro, the 2013 one - I just don't use apple's OS. I really like the rig and I expect to use it until at least 2023 (10 years of use).

I use a dual 10C Xeon (40 threads) with 128gb of RAM as my work desktop. I do builds development for C++, Java, SystemVerilog, and Python codebases. Jetbrains IDE products like IntelliJ, PyCharm, and CLion can use extra cores and ram for indexing our large codebases. The high core count is also useful when compiling C++ from scratch (common for me because I'm often doing weird things that defeat the bazel caches) and running large test suites or medium simulations.

The latest MacBook pros (8 core, 16 threads, 32gb ram, 2tb flash disk) are finally fast enough with enough ram to both run CLion with clangd indexing and do C++ compilation/testing. Full builds are still not advisable (not that a full build is particularly useful since our prod is only Linux and we have CI/desktops to avoid cross-compilation).

I use a desktop, not sure I would call it high end (32 GiB, 6 cores, nvme). I do lots of large builds of things like linux kernels. I doubt any laptop would be able to keep up simply due to thermals.

Yeah, what's considered high-end does shift, although that still sounds higher end than most laptops. I think a typical "high-end" desktop is one that has more cores, memory channels, and PCIe lanes than a typical "mainstream" desktop (whatever that happens to be at the time). Support for ECC memory is also sometimes a requirement.

I use a 3 year-old laptop with 32GB of RAM, an SSD, and a dual-core i7 (U-series) processor. It's reasonably efficient. I think the amount of RAM and the IO speed of my SSD remove most of the hardware bottlenecks I face.

However, I would like compile times to be faster, I do sometimes notice applications hanging, and IntelliJ (we use Java at work) seems limited on how many projects I can run efficiently in a single workspace. I'm just wondering whether a workstation-grade laptop (Dell Precision or Thinkpad P-series) would be a sufficient upgrade, or investing in a desktop would be worthwhile at some point.

> I'm just wondering whether a workstation-grade laptop (Dell Precision or Thinkpad P-series) would be a sufficient upgrade, or investing in a desktop would be worthwhile at some point.

Yes, either 17" machine offers an 8-core CPU and plenty of thermal capacity (i.e. larger chassis than their 15" equivalents), along with more than enough memory (128GB), and in Dell's case, a boatload of HD slots (4, run in whatever RAID config you want). These are desktop replacements, heavy (as in 6.5+ lbs), with 240W power bricks , so you'll probably want them to stay on the desk for most of the time.

I'm personally looking to replace my old Dell Precision with a 15" 5540, maxed out. For Scala work the extra cores help reduce build times, probably the same for Java.

My company provides a pretty standard laptop, but they rarely have more than 2 cores.

In native app development, Android Studio and Xcode are severely bottlenecked by 2 cores. The difference between my laptop and my Mac Mini (6 cores) is astounding.

The difference between a build taking 6x minutes and 1x minutes is more than just 1/6 because it goes from "Well, guess I'll check email/messenger/HN real quick." to taking a sip of coffee.

It also gets real bad when your IDE is forced to fight with your browser, email client, etc. Then you're forced to do nothing, lest your casual actions further slow down your local build.

Usually the "breaking point" is when builds take more than 5 minutes, but especially when they take more 30+ mins.

Slow builds can definitely break concentration. I'm on a dual core as well, although most new business laptops come with 4 cores.

My build times aren't as long, because I'm working with Java-based microservices, so each service takes a minute or so to build (with tests) but even that delay can break concentration. Turning off tests helps, but then you don't always have the immediate feedback of the test results (and don't worry, I always run the tests before committing).

I worked on a codebase a few years ago that took over 44 minutes to compile... a change you would think should take 10 minutes took 3 days. RSS was still a big thing at the time, and did a LOT of reading while waiting.

I used to be happy with Java and .NET builds, until I got to deal with Android builds.

Android is probably the only platform that in almost every conference has at least one talk related to how to improve build speed, thanks Gradle + Android Studio.

A little off topic, but what does your microservice build with tests look like? Trying to figure out what I need to do if I want to try microservices correctly...

The 2018, 6 core Mac Mini is underrated for use as a HEDT in my opinion. It's surprisingly powerful and silent. I really have to thrash something to even get the fans to spin up.

When I started working in my current company, the dual core, 16GB MBP that was given to me was enough since I was working on a single project.

But now that I am working across projects that run 2-3 repositories at a time with Jetbrains IDE, the computer almost barely keep up. I get times where typing will actually lag.

I am contemplating asking them for a Mac Mini instead since I rarely ever venture out from my desk.

Your employer supplied you with the wrong tools for the job. Explain why you would need a more powerful computer and you'll probably get it.

On extremely large projects (15-20 minutes to compile from scratch or longer), the more compute power available, the more productive you can be.

Cumulative wasted minutes from compilation over the course of a year can add up to a lot.

I use a first-gen AMD Threadripper 1950x (16 cores x 2 HT, or 32 logical cores), if that counts as HEDT.

It's absolutely faster than any business laptop for doing builds of medium sized C and C++ projects.

(But I think a non-HEDT desktop would also outperform a typical laptop in this use case -- thermal throttling is a real problem for laptops.)

I bought a used Dell workstation with a 8c16t Xeon E5-2670 and 32GB ECC DDR3 RAM a few years ago. It's a bit outdated now, but it's still faster than the most laptops (for multi core workloads). At the time I had a MacBook Air, so this completely blew it out the water. I remember one time while trying to debug an issue I had 10 docker instances of our CI running (Rails + Cucumber + Firefox) and there was absolutely no performance impact to the desktop experience.

Last year I bought a T470s with 20GB DDR4 and an i7 (U series) as I was mostly working away from home. It's good enough for most of the work I do, but it can be a bit slow at times. The processor just isn't as fast and the integrated graphics struggle with a 4K desktop (I think that's mainly Linux/GNOME being unoptimised though). I haven't noticed it throttling, but my workload usually isn't that CPU intensive.

If you mainly work from home I'd definately suggest building a desktop machine for your needs.

You could get a T480 with the quad-core CPU, or a P5x with a 4, 6, or 8 core CPU (like the 15" MBP) and 64GB :)

To add to the chorus, Threadripper has been incredible for deep learning related workloads, partly for the high core count for prepping batches, but also because it can support multiple GPUs and gobs of RAM. If you have a lot of big compile jobs, it shines there too.

Not a desktop, but... My employer typically gives people a MacBook Pro, but when a colleague left a couple of months ago I snarfed his laptop - a ThinkPad with 24GB RAM and an i7. I put Slackware on it (for I am Old Skool) and it's really handling many many tabs, plus our many-docker local dev environment far better than everyone else's Mac.

Of course, it's far bigger and heavier than the Mac, but also of course (for I am Old Skool) I'm using it with a decent keyboard, a decent-sized monitor, a decent mouse, and a USB-C charger. It does mean I can't go to meetings, but that's ok with me...

Does wanting to count? I don't have a need right now, but some years ago I was doing iOS development; compile times started to get to a point where a more powerful system would've come in handy.

Mind you, my workflow could probably do with adjusting as well, I tended to work like I do with webapps and just continually rebuild/restart and review my changes on the device itself (or an emulator).

Part of me also wishes we had a big setup with multiple docker images running in parallel but ATM we have the luxury of working on 'just' a website (react, some lambdas, back-end are all third party services, we connect to a staging environment during development) so it's not too bad.

But I'd still like a permanent machine, there's something about (and this is me idealizing) having a fixed workspace you don't have to pack up every day. I mean sure disconnecting a laptop and yeeting it into a backpack isn't that much effort but it's the little things.

I did once. It was wonderful not having to take the thing home.

Yes. I have a company issued 2018 MBP 2.6 GHz i7 & 16GB RAM but I prefer to do most of the dev work on my HEDT running Linux (Ubuntu 16.04), 4.0 GHz i7 & 32GB RAM.

It's way better at running Docker instances, a bunch of electron apps, and tons of Chrome tabs simultaneously without a hitch.

I do all my work on desktop workstations; I have a little burner laptop I lug around to meetings, but all it really does is browsing and outlook.

Having a real keyboard, mouse, and four 27" monitors is something I will never leave behind at this point. All that screen real estate to spread out over helps enormously. I can have a browser with our application pulled up, Visual Studio, another browser with doc, Webstorm with the front-end code, SSMS connected to the database, an email client, Notepad++ with logfiles, all the different chat clients I have to use, and more if I really need to, all on screen and available at the same time. I don't have to alt-tab around, I just look and it's there.

HP Z800 with 96GB of RAM, 2TB of RAID 0 rust and a 1TB SSD. C++ dev using Fedora 29.

6 core Xeon, 64GB RAM, some builds take 4hrs....

Holy moly. What language, and roughly how many lines of code?

Perhaps he's building Windows, or some equally gigantic code base?

C++, and N > 5.

I do, but mostly because there's a few projects where running multiple virtual machines with multiple cores and lots of ram is useful for them. Also because I run a VM for cad work for my 3d printer, on the same machine.

Yeah, I sometimes will be running a dozen or so docker containers, although the CPU utilization on those tends not to be very high - RAM is the main bottleneck for me. However, I also don't typically leave those running. I just spin them up when I need to for testing. I'm not sure how fast my other applications would run if I left those up.

I could do with one since vscode + sql server in docker brings my new high end laptop to a halt every now and then until I restart them

My HEDT at home serves as my VR development machine and doubles as a gaming rig. I generally save basic research, design, and sandboxed coding for my MacBook Pro at a coffee shop.

If I had a similar performing laptop that could replace my desktop in terms of GPU performance and compatibility with the devices I use, my HEDT would start collecting dust.

Not a HEDT here, just a regular desktop, but it is significantly more responsive than a business laptop. Also much cheaper than a laptop comparable in performance. Plus it's upgradeable so more future-proof.

I still have an old laptop that I use to ssh into my workstation occasionally.

Depends what you're doing. I'm a low-level developer, my build times are less than a minute, so cashing out on a huge beefy PC would barely make a difference to my workflow.

The standard business laptop msxes out with 16GB, which is good enough if you don’t run all the secondary stuff like databases locally. But 32GB would be great.

Reading the replies to this make me very grateful that I just run a couple of Docker containers for local Postgres/Redis along with some non-compiled node.js

Not a great example.

Web Dev. Going from a 2015 MBP to the new touchbar model, my cold build times were cut in half. Other than, saving 15 seconds once per day, I noticed nothing.

Try going backwards. It’s easier to notice the speed difference the other way around :)

Yeah, work on some pretty big codebases with an IDE. CLion, IntelliJ, and PyCharm are pretty resource intensive for instance.

Recently picked up a 9900X and now my company's javascript app builds almost twice as fast ;)

Not everyone does web development and can work with just an editor on their dev machine...