OEMs can still control load performance, it's not entirely determined by TDP.
Anandtech has a good article: https://www.anandtech.com/show/13544/why-intel-processors-dr...
Depending on OEM settings and cooling capacity, it's possible for Intel CPUs to indefinitely run at greater than their base clocks and TDP.
https://www.macrumors.com/2018/07/24/throttling-fix-2018-mac...
Why does Intel let OEMs play with that? It's to give OEMs a knob they can play with to balance perf and price for their segment. It lets OEMs cheap out on cooling (or go with new form factors like the tiny GPD models) and go with the low minimums, or have a full system that's capable of higher TDP like Apple's tend to be.
On my fanless 12" MB with a 7W TDP m7-6Y75 (1.3 Ghz base, 3.1 GHz max turbo), running a Prime95 torture test stabilizes at the following for the CPU via Intel Power Gadget: 9.5W, 1.95 GHz, 90°. (Laptop feels warm to the touch - it only ever feels "hot" under GPU load.) Normal all-thread load stabilizes around 2.5 GHz.
Your post may apply if we're working with 4K+ resolution video files, rendering and other activities, but the modern programmer, even compiling binaries, will be fine on a MacBook Air.
How do I know?
I use a 2 generation old Macbook as my primary personal development machine. I write Go, Rust, Java and TypeScript using the common tool chains for all those languages.
A perfect example of this the recent Level1Techs video about compiling an Unreal engine game using the AMD Threadripper 3990X[1]. Some concrete advice:
1. Often the heaviest aspect of a programmer's workflow isn't compiling the code, but running automated tests using VMs and stuff
2. compilers tend to benefit from large cache sizes and good single-threaded performance. Multi-threaded performance only makes a difference in limited scenarios.
I've also heard that storage performance, and in particular storage latency, can make a big difference on compiler performance, but the difference is starker on Windows than on Linux because NTFS is a lot slower than many Linux file systems (EXT4, XFS, etc.).
The thing is, we as programmers don't have a good mental model for how the software tools we use (IDEs, virtualization/docker, compilers) scale with modern hardware, and very few technology reviewers are producing content that would help us understand.
I don't see Airs as development platforms. They are portable platforms.
I wrote a little about this; it's for Rails but the same ideas apply:
https://medium.com/@bdcravens/fixing-docker-for-mac-and-rail...
Add some server processes, UI watchers/builders, and my Thinkpad starts to freeze up. In an ideal world, I would have a low-latency remote desktop going, but even in 2020 it seems like a pipe dream.
5ms encoding lag, 10ms network lag, totally workable.
On the flip side standard issue laptops are now 16" Macbook Pro's with 32GB of RAM which is pretty hardware.
Not to mention previous MacBook Air were Dual Core only.
A lot of usecases involve running a replication of the server environment locally in resource intensive containers
I'm surprised no one else operates this way.
The performance gains are immense.
It's immensely flexible and I'm surprised it's not more common.
Also, a cloud VM, if it breaks, is replaced "for free" and "instantly"; fixing a physical machine has a cost and is a delay. Unless you're big enough to keep a spare (probably makes sense for many dozens of machines), it also looks a bit uneconomical from the business's POV.
Never mind that your cloud costs in a year end up being comparable to said workstation.
That's why I'm tempted to build a custom workstation at home: so that I always have access to the compute resources I need to do my job.
A typical compile for me takes about twice as long compared to colleagues with newer H-series processors, but the individual projects are pretty small so that often isn't a huge deal.
However, once you try and run nearly a dozen docker containers for local testing, things slow down quite a bit. Multitasking while those tests are running is very difficult.
Great machine, only wish I had waited for the true tone and keyboard redesign but those are minor, have grown to love the keyboard.
I'm still using a 2013 MBA as my primary machine day to day. It has an i7 and 8gb of RAM. I've been waiting for the keyboard change before I upgraded, but today I see my options are i5 and i7 (as 2013). I'd get 16gb of RAM, but literally have no clue about the chip stuff. I'm assuming we've moved on somewhat from 2013?!
Any help much appreciated! Thanks in advance!
Complicating things recently is the introduction of the Xeon W and i9 lines, but for the most part the Xeon ones have yet more a new features and i9 are higher core counts to compete with AMD.
In broad strokes in the laptop space the majority of enhancements since 2013 I would say is higher RAM capacity (that Apple as a manufacturer has not to pursue compared to Lenovo, etc.), still yet lower overall power consumption to improve battery life, DDR3 to DDR4 ram, bigger L1/L2/L3 caches, and normal improvements to embedded graphics to support bigger onboard and external displays, and PCI-E enhancements for drives as NVMe-style drives are what I would consider the new standard.
i3 - Dual Core i5 - Quad Core i7 - Quad Core and slightly higher Clock speed.
That is it. Apple has kept it fairly simple most of the time.
Worth nothing the i7 is only very very very slightly faster as you are limited by thermals. I dont think it is worth the price. If you ever need the processor power then the current ( and future ) MBA isn't for you.
And in all honestly the CPU performance between your 2013 MBA and this MBA isn't all that different if you are getting the Dual Core. After all your 2013 CPU had 15W of thermals to play with, this newer CPU only has 9W peak, ( and 7.5W average ).
But the overall package of MacBook Air still many times better. Screen Quality, Ports, SSD Speed. Speakers. Not sure if they have updated the WebCam, if not it will be worst than your 2013 MBA.
My work won't be processor intensive, just a personal machine. But given how long I kept my old one, I intend to keep this one for a long time, and I'm not sure where the best price:performance tradeoff is. I could argue going low-end and replacing it sooner, or high end, and keeping it forever.
that said, about a year or two ago was also when it just started feeling too slow to be usable (beachballs all the time). I blame web bloat, mostly :-/
I bought it new, so I definitely got my money's worth out of it.
PHP Dev often means some sort of local server running too.
compilers are often compute bound (certainly on SSDs).
web servers are almost never compute bound.
It's OK to geek out about hardware, if that's your thing. But it's not really necessary for most people -- even programmers.
45W will get your laptop pretty warm and noisy and will drain your battery.
Been looking at the newer gaming notebooks, and I'm waiting the "real world confrontation" of 10th generation i7s (specially those that have AVX512) vs Renoir (lots of cores, AVX2 on a single instruction and (not as much as desktop) lots of cache), since I run some numeric heavy code and it's not quite clear how they'll stand up to each other.
Why do I run this on a notebook and not a desktop? Because I'm always on the move, and I can pack the notebook and go anywhere I have to and be able to work with or without internet connection (which is sometimes the case).
But I am also interested in the upcoming processor generations.
The P1 comes with a 9th gen i7, I assume they'd eventually get a gen 3 with 10th gen i7 and then I'll be able to compare.
Bychance, have you seen the article from puget systems on how to use MKL with Ryzen[1]? It explores some of the different trade-offs between AMD and Intel for numeric computing.
[1] https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/hpc/How-To-Use-MKL-with-AM...
So put it on a stand and plug it in? Problem solved.
No it isn't any more suitable, because you can put your laptop on a stand and plug it in to achieve the same thing.
HiDPI. Once I had used a HiDPI screen for a while, I can't really tolerate LoDPI displays anymore.
I bought a 2018 15 inch MBP with 6 core i9, 32 GB of ram and vega GPU with the idea that it would be my one stop development machine. The system is terrible, especially considering the outrageous price - it does have sufficient compute power but the thermals are insanely bad - it's constantly turning the fans to 100% and I can't even tune the power usage - when I run a VM/emulator along the IDE people in the office start turning their head in my direction because of the fan noise.
And the performance still isn't even close to a mid range desktop machine which would have cost 1/4 the price.
I'm seriously considering selling my MBP buying this Mac Book Air top config (I need an OSX machine to develop iOS/OSX apps, otherwise I would go for Lenovo X1 Carbon) and building a desktop which will be always on VPN for heavy lifting + it can replace my gaming console.
I'm seriously considering selling my MBP buying this Mac Book Air top config (I need an OSX machine to develop iOS/OSX apps, otherwise I would go for Lenovo X1 Carbon) and building a desktop which will be always on VPN for heavy lifting + it can replace my gaming console.
I have a MacBook Pro 2018 and Intel NUC running Linux with exactly the same CPU. In typical C/C++/Rust builds, the Linux NUC is perceptibly much faster than the MacBook.
Didn't dive much deeper, but I'd guess the difference is thermals (despite the NUC having a small enclosure) and much higher system call overhead in macOS.
That said, I still like having a Mac as well, since there are so many great applications that I use frequently. But a sweet spot (as you suggest) is a reasonably powerful MacBook for the things that macOS is good at and a powerful Linux workstation or server for compute.
FWIW, the Y CPU in the Air is set at 9W instead of the usual 4.5W
For example, the only ThinkPad of that generation's T-series that had one was the T470p which had a significantly different design in terms of batteries, thunderbolt features, etc. to accommodate the significantly larger cooling system. With the very next year's model, all the models got quad-core with their usual low-voltage/low-power (and low battery usage) design.
Does that still holds when using the power adapter?
No? The base model had a i5-8210Y?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacBook_Air#Technical_specific...
I'm not totally sure I agree. I typically do a lot of programming on my MacBook Air. It's simply a box I use to ssh to something else more powerful to do the actual runs.
Yes, if you're running computationally intensive stuff on your MacBook Air you're going to be disappointed, but if what you're mostly doing is typing into a terminal screen then it's probably perfect. And probably even over-powered? :)
I'm not talking about i3/i5/i7, but rather U/Y/H. This letter determines the TDP (thermal design power/point) them machine is designed to run at. The TDP will govern the setting for the base clock speed, and, just as importantly, the throttling behabior under load.
Processor series TDPs are Y: 4.5W, U: 15W, H: 45W.
The new MacBook Air appears to have a Y series processor, like the MacBook, which means it will be aggressively throttled to keep power consumption and heat generation low.
Practically, that means that the new Air will not be capable of running sustained workloads much above its base clock speed, which makes it unsuitable for many programming-related tasks.
The Pro is still a much better choice for programmers. The 13 is suitable for many things, but the 16, with the H series processor, is really preferred for computationally intensive work.
You can get away with this machine if your workflow primary involves a text editor and remote servers, but otherwise I would still opt for the pro.