The first 14nm processors started shipping in the 15" in 2015 - 5 years ago.

My current 8 year old macbook has a 22nm processor. I would never have thought 8 years ago that Intel would only have managed a single node shrink since then.

I'm jealous and genuinely curious where do you guys work that your employers can afford to get everyone such expensive machines.

I've been a dev in the EU for 8 years now and at most places I've worked or interviewed(not FAANG) the machines you get are some cheapo HP/Lenovo/Dell with only the executives having Apple hardware.

I never understood why companies in the west cheap out on hardware so much since compared to the cost of office rent and employee salaries that's a drop in the ocean, they could buy everyone MacBooks or Ryzen towers and it wouldn't even dent their bottom line.

This is pretty typical here.

Heck we swap build servers every 6-12 months based on test speed. We buy one of every new CPU and do a test run of auto build and ptest. If it is reasonably faster we order a new rack and replace the old boxes. Power and cooling is way more $$ then the HW. Every month we do not need a new cage is a win. We are deploying AMD Epyc now with 10G-T + 4x1G (not network limited in our test, just segmentation to test DUTs) with a core of 100G for fileservers and 25G for services. File servers are TrueNAS SSD shelves for test and with spinning rust for build artifacts. We run ~1000 containers on a single server in ptest (scaling that was fun to figure out ... hint you have to play with networking stack ARP timers - strace is your friend).

In a place where talent is as competitive as the bay, you wouldn’t survive making people use subpar machines.

But most businesses here are the same, you get lucky to get any nice feature over the 'same laptop that sales gets' which is barely more than a Chromebook. And getting an external monitor that's not the cheapest bulk-buy model was also pretty hard to do (I had a friend in marketing who helped me get a larger display with better colors at that place).

Frankly with the cost of hiring you, spending $3k to make you even a few percent more productive if money well spent.

A high performance SSD, capable of over 3GB/s, is less than $200 for 1TB.

But seriously, a 970 Evo Plus is a high performance SSD suitable for a workstation and that's $400 for two.

Though I would gladly dump the MacBook Pro 16" I currently have to use for work in an instant for a high-end Lenovo/Dell. Apart from MacOS being extremely flakey these days (why does Spotlight only seem to pop up 50% of the time), I don't understand why they don't provide proper ISO and instead give us some form of ANSI that has the dancing alien (§) dedicated key, and why they hide the # which as a Pro developer I use all the time.

That it also spends its entire time overheating so it burns my lap is just the icing on the cake.

But when I used a MacBook Pro about 10 years ago the machine overheated all the time and burnt my lap. They are just a shitty design, but they look pretty.

Plus it seems to disable the switch between windows in the same app.

I think if you have any way of escalating then the best thing is to come up with numbers, such as "a faster computer would let me compile the program in 20 less seconds, which is this much time earned", or "a better screen would not require me to have an external monitor".

Now, I think that to get a 16" MBP for work requires quite a specific use case, because it's really a machine one should use only when it's the only computer they have. For the same price I think you could get a faster desktop + a more portable laptop.

The only difference? I can receive encrypted emails only on the Windows laptop due to some software not being available for the Mac.

I do all my development on macOS, and if spending $4k on a machine means I am more productive, can get work done faster, it's a return on investment that pays back multiple times.

Do note that laptop refreshes in my past companies (current is ~2 years) have been on average every 2.5 year... so it's not like I get a new laptop yearly.

That Dell Latitude is frustrating to use. The trackpad is absolutely atrocious, the display is dim, the keyboard is really mushy and causes pain in my hands when I use it for short periods of time...

I'm in the US, but I've been in a similar position to you; my last job gave me a tower with 8GB of ram and a Core 2 Duo running Windows 7 32-bit. Utterly useless. I had to sneak Ubuntu onto it when nobody was looking. They couldn't even tell the difference.

I ended up having the last laugh when every computer in the office got wiped because somebody decided running the mail server on our ActiveDirectory server was a good idea, and also thought that leaving ports open on the mail server was a good idea.

Last place I worked I got an HP Windows desktop and told to remote in from a 12" laptop whenever I needed to work from home or show off something in a meeting. That place also wanted to knock down three single-person offices so they could fit 10 developers in the same space. And for the last month or so I had a developer working next to me on my own desk since management didn't prioritise us developers over HR.

My current workplace and my previous are both in the public sector in Norway.

On the other hand if you like it, you like it, and cheap is beautiful.

Recently I replaced 4 Asus monitors with led backlights that were produced in 2014 and 2015. Asus says 300 nits. Tested them when I was calibrating their replacements and they were 110-120 at full brightness.

Monitors color shift and dim as they age... that’s why hardware calibrators exist.

So if we want increase our chip's performance any further, we need a fundamental change in our technology. And since silicon atom is 210 pm big and carbon atom (graphene is made from carbon) is 170 pm big, we need to change our architecture as shrinking transistors will not be possible anymore. I mean CISC/RISC, drop x86 support and so on.

Eh, Intel's 14nm is 37M transistors/mm2. TSMC and SS are both up to 52M/mm2 at 10nm, and 92M/mm2 at 7nm. Both Apple and AMD's latest gen stuff is on TSMC's 7nm process _today_. Yes, Intel's 10nm is at 101M/mm2, but until they can get mass production on that they're falling substantially behind.

(I stand by "most", but it's nice to hear that someone's making actual progress again.)

Intel and AMD might be able to deliver somewhat higher performance by throwing a whole bunch of cores at the problem, but they do so at a much higher cost in power requirements. And it would be easy enough to design ARM machines with an equal number of cores (or even way more), and still have much lower power requirements.

Intel stagnated, and has high power requirements. ARM has caught up, and has much lower power requirements.

The reasoning seems pretty simple to me.

ARM hasn't. Apple has. Apple's implementation of the ISA since A6 is unrelated to ARM's.

Also Intel and AMD have not delivered higher performance via more cores; they delivered lower price for (say) 64 cores worth of performance, by putting them all on the same chunk of silicon (edit: or at least in the same package). (There are some slight improvements in inter-processor interrupt and cache-forwarding latency, but if that's a performance bottleneck, the problem is bad parallelization at the code level.)

Have you looked at the encoding of Thumb-2 (T32) and particularly A64 (their newly designed instruction set for 64 bit)? Their instruction encoding is in my opinion much more convoluted than x86.

Arguably AMD did the exact opposite - lower prices via splitting a processor into multiple pieces of silicon. (Chip price scale exponentially with area at the high end)

    Sure, but that's them having a competent 
    (well, less incompetent) ISA and microarchitecture

Note that this is still Moore's law. You're thinking of Dennard scaling. That basically ran out 12 years ago.