Gaming workloads are strict superset of almost any other workload (because they are extremely taxing on almost any metric a platform can have). Game benchmarks are abundant and reproducible. They are a good indicator of how a platform will deal with almost any other software.

AMD did have a CAD benchmark thrown in.

> Threadripper

Not a bad choice at all (wait for that 5000 TR announcement), however, a *950X comes close to TR for much less. My 3950X has made a striking difference for Rust compilation times and I'm strongly considering a 5950X.

Indeed. And for rust compilation, good single threaded performance can have a significant impact on that last annoyingly slow linking step (at least when building executables).

I've noticed the same thing on EC2 instances, compiling, e.g. Alacritty, there wasn't a lot of difference between 8 vs 16 vCPUs since the last step took a significant portion of time and was single-threaded. It's fun watching 16 (or 32) CPUs maxed out though.

Have you noticed an actual improvement? I couldn't pinpoint what was the bottleneck in the last Rust program compilation step at all. I have two machines with extremely fast NVMe SSDs and an incremental compilation improvement from i7-8565U (laptop, 24s) to Xeon W-2150B (iMac Pro, 12s) was extremely disappointing.

I'm pondering a Threadripper workstation but I'm very worried if I'll gain any actual incremental compilation speed at all.

Do you have any observations?

I'm also having a 3950x for Rust work and it has been the fastest CPU I've ever used. It just flies every day and makes rust compilation times not an issue anymore.

That means, I really don't know do I want to have the trouble of finding the 5950x and the work of replacing the CPU. I really don't feel like I need more CPU power at this point.

But replacing my 2080ti with a new fast Radeon, that would be something...

Did it help with the final compilation step which seems to be single-core-bound?

Did it improve the final step though? That seems to be single core and I still can't pinpoint how to accelerate it (written a down-thread comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24739796)

Can gaming workloads simulate the 100% of all cores that a parallel large scale native C++ compilation will generate?

If the game has a CPU bounded work load that scales well across multiple threads/processes. Honestly, most games do not, and are likely gonna run into Amdahl's law much quicker than compilation.

Modern game engines can, yes

Games are typically written in C++, so that's a yes. As for the threading, older (2yr or so back) games tend to assume 4 cores and don't scale past that (thanks, Intel!). More recent games tend to aim at arbitrary horizontal scaling.

You do still get major titles that are completely single-threaded.

? no

The parent was talking about c++ compilation.

A c++ compiler is very different from a game engine written in c++.

written in C++ not means it's compatible workload. Gaming performance is just gaming. For gaming, realtimeness is important and normally single thread perf is important even though some process is multithreaded.

uh what??? No most games do no scale like compilation does. For instances when compiling a large program GNU make lets me the following: make -j 16

That will create 16 instances of the compiler each compiling different compilation units. I could even do the following: make -j 128 and that will spawn a 128 processes, and still scale. I can keep scaling this assuming I have enough compilation units (aka files)

Games use threads.

Compilation parallelism is generally bounded roughly the number of independent compilation units. For my main codebase, that is in excess of 1200. That is, on a system with 1200 cores, I could use all 1200 cores productively, at full capacity (ignoring disk i/o waits) [1]

My impression is that few games (if any) can ever approach this level of potential parallelism. There are not many tasks in computing with this level of "embarrassing parallelism".

[1] somebody actually did this with Ardour once, on a system with 1024 cores. The current normal-system compile time record for the software is a little under 5min (Ryzen Threadripper 2950X + 64GB of RAM). The k-core system completed the build in less than 10 seconds :)

Surprised that the record doesn't belong to a 32-core CPU, hmm. Quite interesting.

Any data on the precise machine specs that did the record? I'm talking about the TR 2950x one, not the custom-built many-core machine.

I'd be interested mostly in motherboard and RAM speed.

> My impression is that few games (if any) can ever approach this level of potential parallelism.

Which is embedded in my first comment on game multithreading: "older" games assume 4 cores, some are single-threaded.

This has no bearing on how new the engine is. The workloads scale much differently when it comes to parallelism. While it might possible to get a little more parallelism and concurrency with a newer engine. The ability to scale is much more limited for games.

Just because a game uses threads does not mean it can magically get rid of Amdahl's law. The CPU workload of games does not scale anything like compilation.

> does not mean it can magically get rid of Amdahl's law.

Neither can compilation.

I never claimed it did. Compilation is an embarrassingly parallel task. This means you can increase the number of threads by a much much larger amount before you hit Amdahl's law. That is not true for video games unless you count what runs on GPUs. Not only can it be less obvious on what to parallelize in a game engine. You quickly start to see the parallel slowdown/diminishing returns in game engines. Further, not every thread in video game is going to use the CPU at 100%, a lot them will be waiting on IO, and not using any time slices till that IO task is finished.

Games do not scale like compilation, it does not matter what engine or how new that engine is.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embarrassingly_parallel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_slowdown

> Further, not every thread in video game is going to use the CPU at 100%

Modern game engines do not segregate work according to threads, they use thread pools. If one green thread is busy with I/O, work can be scheduled on its OS thread.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_stealing

Gaming doesn't really have SIMD or FP at all though, does it?

Plenty of it. Going trough the transform hierarchy (tons of 4x4 matrix multiplications which definitely are vectorized) and then the physics simulations, and that’s just part of it.

Couldn't be further from the truth. Rasterization is all linear algebra. That being said, you don't really see games with the likes of AVX-512.

That all happens on the GPU. There's a tiny (trivial) amount of linalg on the CPU and the rest is punted to shaders.

Physics are still often CPU, though I guess sometimes on compute shaders by now?

Then there's bad engines, e.g. Fallout 4 seems like it might be calculating some part of the shadows on the CPU…

It's not always trivial, especially if any computational geometry is being done (read: any game with a landscape).

Floating point yes, but SIMD depends.

As far as I see/understand it:

Gaming is a single-thread use case that resonates with a lot of people and is generally easy to understand / relate to.

AMD could have used some other single-core use case like high frequency trading, but that would not have been grasped by so many people like the gaming use case.

Now add the huge success of youtube channels like LinusTechTips and similar and you get the point: the gaming use case helps deliver the message to a wider audience.

Gamers are the biggest audience when it comes to high-end consumer CPUs. You don't need $550 CPU for your laptop or PC if you don't play games.

Many professionals, including developers, don't need such CPUs too.

When I need a lot of CPU power, I just ask my company to provide me servers.

>>Many professionals, including developers, don't need such CPUs too.

Lol, sorry, but our C++ projects have an average build time of 40 minutes on an 8-core/16threaded Xeon CPU in my workstation. Even using Fastbuild/SN-DBS it still takes 5-10 minutes. We'll take any number of cores we can get, thank you.

Yeah, but there are 10 JavaScript developers for each C/C++ developer.

I'm a Python developer and I can work from laptop. I do a lot of data processing and my laptop can handle development and testing. On production, some of the scripts are running on 64 core machines and use vector operations via numpy and scipy.

Even JS devs “compile” their code and use multiple threads. And when JS runs, every JS engine uses multiple threads (parsing, running, GC). Just look at how many threads chrome is using on a single web page. No need to throw shade on JS devs and their equipment needs.

I think OP's main argument is that if you actually need a lot of cores, then you should probably be offloading some of that work onto a server.

I currently use a 6-core mobile H-class CPU for my work that is a mix of Java and JS development, with a bunch of browser tabs and docker containers running, large IntelliJ project, etc. While my system often has a lot of processes/threads running, the main cost of those is in memory utilization rather than constant CPU performance.

I'm not saying that can't use more CPU horsepower, but it's certainly enough for my needs (for now). The main benefit of having more cores for me right now is just to maintain system responsiveness while running a bunch of background tasks, rather than raw throughput of large compile jobs.

Kind of the same setup for me. Primarily Java work on a 6 core laptop. Between Chrome absurd RAM/cpu usage, IntelliJ, Gradle, Weblogic memory usage is just super high and cpu is not so little either at times even without build. Add anything extra I'm running for diagnostic, performance tuning and things are very troublesome. And Mac doesn't seem to handle such pressure as gracefully as Linux (though I'm not 100% sure).

I'm running Linux and things generally feel pretty smooth to me. It wouldn't surprise me if Linux had better multi-tasking support.

I think more than better multi tasking it's handling of load when things are at the limit in some fashion whether is excessive cpu or ram.

Yes, but you can't use 105W CPU in your laptop anyway.

In a company where I work, almost every front-end developer uses a laptop with an external display because it's a portable solution.

I don't know if you can use it, but you sure can buy it: https://www.originpc.com/gaming/laptops/eon15-x-amd/

Sure, there's also a company called Eurocom which will happily stick a 165W nominal TDP Intel CPU into a laptop case - but there is no way it can run at maximum boost for a very long time.

LOL I'm a "js developer" and the system I work on requires like 10 docker containers. Not sure where this idea comes from that JS developers don't need power.

Webpack compilation of hello world projects are insanely long task. If new CPU can reduce this *hit in 20% I will be happy

But if people switch to those better CPUs, they will make the compilation even more complex... we just can't win the battle with bloated software.

None of the main platform client dev tools are lightweight. Xcode and Android Studio are massive and super complex, not just Webpack. Client dev isn't as simple as we like to pretend.

You are just wasting cycles and memory. Don't use docker if you care about performance.

This kind of response is supremely unhelpful. I work at a company with a large team, I'm not just going to tell all 300+ people to drop everything and rewrite the entire dev stack. Docker has become the de facto standard for dev environments.

My comment was flippant because your comment was useless. Of course if you decide to use something like docker you will force yourself into a performance corner. This would happen with literally any piece of software. It's not then valid to use that as a way of requiring a better cpu. No what you need is to get your development environment in order.

Btw docker is only standard for CI systems. Never would I advise anyone to actually use docker for local development let alone 10 docker instances at once. It's just pure insanity.

Why is it not valid to buy a better cpu to have a better dev environment? What does validity even mean here? I was never told I had to check in with you when making decisions. Before docker I remember spending tons of time setting up dependencies locally on machines when starting a new job, or maintaining puppet scripts to do so. And then since machines change over time, and run a different OS, your dev environment never quite matches prod. A $500 CPU is drastically cheaper than the bugs, headache, and time suck of maintaining a dev env.

Of course you can buy a better Cpu. It's not a valid argument in this context. The OP was talking about needing a better CPU because his large C++ project takes a lot of time to compile. That's something inherent to C++ programming. You then make the argument that js devs also require better CPUs because your js project use 10 docker instances. That's not valid logic since docker and js have nothing to do with eachother.

There are many alternatives to docker which don't cripple your computer. Nix is the best one.

FYI, your objections here don't make sense. Developers of any kind can benefit from better horsepower.

Whether it's having to run a lot of Docker containers, a large C++ project, or a large Webpack project.

Nitpicking and criticizing someone's dev environment is irrelevant.

If you don't like their example, I'm working on a JS project where I run a lot of local VMs to locally test the web client in different configurations. It would continue to be a bizarre response if you thought it was time to tell me to "just use browserstack.com" or something. Software isn't as easy as we think.

You misunderstand what I said. I didn't say any developers won't benefit from having a better CPU. What I disagree with is the statement that JS developmant is comparable in this way to C++ dev. In C++ dev the required horsepower is INHERENT because of the language. This is simply not the case for JS development. If you require high horsepower for JS dev it's because you work in a dev environment that results in requiring that horsepower. It is a CHOICE someone made when setting up the dev environment. That same choice could be made for any dev environment and doesn't have much to with JS.

With modern JS toolchains, arguably JS devs care more about top single core perf than C++/Rust/Java devs.

"Any number of cores" != "Fastest possible core design"

I also compile large, multi-compilation-unit C++ programs, and it's much, much better to have a 24 or 32 threads clocked at 2 GHZ than 8 threads clocked at 5 GHz.

The parent comment was talking about fast individual core designs, which are genuinely useful for gaming, and can't be approximated by adding more cores.

> 8-core/16threaded Xeon CPU

What generation and what frequency?

Those things can be quite dissapointing for what they cost compared to consumer CPUs.

I would expect the 5950X to be around 3-6 times faster than an 8 core Xeon.

It's the Xeon W-2145.

I have the iMac Pro with the Xeon W-2150B and I definitely expected more compilation speed.

It's fast, sure, but for that price tag I expected more. Currently evaluating buying a TR 2950x workstation. That seems to be amazingly fast though my research on the net is still ongoing.

I wasn't familiar with Fastbuild or SN-DBS. Can/should they be used in conjunction with ccache?

20% faster CPU isn't going to solve your problem. You should look into caching and distributed compilation.

The biggest companies in the world writing the largest software don't have build times that slow.

Uhm, yes they do? And I did mention Fasbuild and SN-DBS?

Been a long time since I've done heavy C++ development (long time) but how does Fastbuild compare to Incredibuild?

It's about the same, we've stopped using Incredibuild some time ago because there were almost no benefits to it over Fastbuild and the cost was huge.

If you compile large c++ codebases they are a godsend. A slide showed 5950x was only 9% better at a compiler benchmark than the 3950x though. A deeper pipeline based IPC increase may suffer with missed branch prediction in the type of parsing and optimizing workloads of compilers and not get the full benefit.

Yeah I noticed that comparison and was surprised at that given the amazing single thread benchmark performance improvement. We really have to see the benchmark.

One might end up in a situation where for developers the older generation cpu being cheaper and more available might make more sense.

I wish somebody really did some suitable benchmark suite for developers.

You don't want older generation CPU. You won't clean/build your project after every change. You'll use some kind of incremental build which will use few cores. Your IDE will use few cores. And significantly faster single-thread performance from new generation will be extremely helpful.

Do C++ developers prefer desktop computers at work? I think a lot of them use laptops.

We are a company that only does development in C++ and everyone has a desktop workstation. Laptops are simply too slow unless absolutely huge and besides my minimum requirement in a workstation nowadays is 64GB of ram with 128GB preferred. Hard to find a laptop that can support that much.

Honest question, why no build farm?

We have a build farm. This is just for running the editor.

Why does it need that much?

Because the data it loads is about 40GB in size? If I then want to actually run locally built client, then it very easily hits 128GB. Games development :P

My MacBook has 64, don’t think 128 is an option.

You can always get roughly 2-3x the CPU performance of a laptop in a desktop (2x core count, higher clock due to much bigger heatsink). It makes sense to use a desktop for the compile times.

The most performance you can get in a mobile CPU right now is an 8 core ryzen. On a desktop you can get the 3990x at 64 cores. That's at least 8x the performance.

Can't fit a 32 core threadripper in a laptop no matter how hard you try. Afaik most use workstation desktops if they're working on large codebases with long compile times (think chrome, Firefox, unreal engine, etc. with compile times often in the hours on slow computers).

I usually find myself developing C++ code directly on servers, via SSH. In that setup, a laptop + external monitor is my preference, because of portability.

If I ever get to do local-machine development again, the choice of laptop vs. desktop really depends on how build times compare, and which platform has Intel CPUs with the required ISA extensions.

Which ISA extensions are useful for compilation?

None really, compilation is considered a branch/integer workload and has been that way for decades. Its a lot of tree traversals, and short string manipulation. One of the bigger boosts in recently memory were the "fast strings (rep mov*)" implementations about 10 years ago.

Single core compilation is actually a fairly good metric for general purpose performance. Of course it scales almost linearly with core count too.

Regarding the speed of compilation, I'm not sure which if any recent ISA extensions matter.

What matters to me is the ISA extensions that are needed by the software I'm building, typically DL or HPC code. Life is easier when I can build and test the software on my local machine, without having to involve some fancy new server.

Many of us who do use laptops do the builds elsewhere.

depends on the project. it takes me about 20 minutes to do a full build on an overclocked 9700k. if I were forced to use a laptop, I would probably quit.

What about spinning up a 24core vm and mount your code with sshfs for those compiles? Edit: corrected ashes to sshfs

this has been discussed internally. for a variety of reasons, testing the software on a remote machine is kinda painful, so we would still have the overhead of copying the executable back to the developer's machine. the more straightforward approach is just to buy fast desktops for all the devs. a desktop with 32GB ram, a top of the line consumer cpu, and a middling gpu is roughly the same price as a good ultrabook anyway.

also, c++ compilation doesn't scale perfectly with more cores. linking is still single threaded, AFAIK.

lld will parallelize your link step. Major improvement over ld. Barely any change to the rest of your build process.

Have you tried it with a Rust project? Is there a real gain? Really curious and willing to try.

sshfs adds far to much latency to large compiles which tend to open a ton of little files, read a KB or two, and close them. If your on a local LAN its doable on NFS or other low latency network sharing, but for everything going over the internet ssh is going to be far to slow. In those cases its better to just git pull the changes and maintain a local copy on the compile target.

What do you mean? The code is on the build server. You only need to push your human-timescale changes.

Is DistCC (or related tech) not a thing anymore?

Do have to wonder if 5950X is that much better than 5900X in GCC?

It should be: all the way up to the 64 core threadripper scales pretty linearly for compiling. It probably won't be worth it over whatever the 3950X price drops to though, if per-core performance is really only 9% better in compiling workloads.

I mean more in price to performance. Will +200 dollars be worth the lower base clock and increased core count?

11% lower base clock, 33% more cores. The 5950X also has 100% more L3 cache.

> Many professionals, including developers, don't need such CPUs too

While I agree that many people don't need mass multi-threading, I don't count developers among those.

Compilation and transpiration are computationally intensive, and usually take advantage of multi-threading. Developers often also run multiple virtual machines and containers, for example to run a database, message bus or blob store.

As a developer, I'll take all the compute capacity I can get, thank you very much!

Apparently you don't do development, local virtualization, work on enterprise apps, or any of 1000s of other things that benefit from extra horsepower

They said biggest audience, not the only one.

I definitely need ram way more than I need CPU, but there are still plenty of things that CPU helps me save time with as a dev, and often those things are somewhat parallel. So more cores is good too.

> Many professionals, including developers, don't need such CPUs too.

True, though I think there's a distinction between "need" and "can make use of". If I'm going to spend 8+ hours a day working on a computer, I'd probably be willing to spend a extra 20% or whatever on total system cost to eek out a bit extra performance even if that cost doesn't make sense from a strict cost/benefit calculation.

That said, there isn't really a good way for developers to calibrate the hardware to their workload.

It's not that developers don't need these CPUs, it's just that there's a lot more gamers than developers, and most of them will buy laptops or be provided workstations with Ryzen PRO or Threadripper processors.

You don't need it if you DO play games. I'm running an 11 year old Xeon, that maxes every modern game at 2560x1600 on a 1070. GPU is WAY more important than CPU in gaming.

> GPU is WAY more important than CPU in gaming.

depends on the game. plenty of popular esports titles will bottleneck on the CPU with even a low end graphics card.

Look at any gaming benchmarks, unless they are running them at low resolutions, the CPU is not the bottleneck. I agree there is some fringe simulation cases, but most gaming is not inhibited by CPU. Once you're up in the 2k and 4k land, the GPU is the bottleneck. This video focuses on 1080p performance benefits. There is zero reason to be upgrading between generations unless you're just burning money. Anyone paying $500+ every time there is a new CPU platform, is guaranteed already running 2k and 4k content.

The big CPU-bottlenecked esports game is CS:GO, or any other Valve / Source game. Even on an older CPU with mediocre single-threaded perf (i7-5820K), I can run the game fine on high settings, 1080p (100-250fps), but it occasionally dips down below my 144hz refresh rate, which can be annoying.

And yeah, the GPU is never begged while playing, but multiple CPU cores definitely are.

Also, emulation is another big place where CPU bottlenecking is a thing. Look at Dolphin (Gamecube/Wii), Citra (Wii U), and yuzu (Switch), they're all CPU bound. Folks in the various subreddits will ask why their new GPU isn't netting them a higher framerate, and it's because the GPU is almost not even used (though in some cases with better graphical effects, shaders, etc. they can be beneficial)

it's really not so clear cut outside of the few highly gpu-intensive AAA titles that get released each year. I play csgo (an older, but still very popular game) on a 4k display. my gpu hovers around 40% at max settings, while a couple cpu cores are constantly pegged.

it is hard to find benchmarks to show this however. the reputable sites mainly focus on 1080p because this is where the difference between cpus is most visible. doesn't mean there isn't a meaningful difference at higher resolutions, it just isn't as good a way to show what they are trying to show in a cpu review.

> There is zero reason to be upgrading between generations unless you're just burning money.

agreed, the speedup is almost never worth such a short upgrade cycle, especially for consumers. but this is moving the goalposts given the thread's context.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmeWo7BLN9Y According to DF, 4k games are bottlenecking on the CPU via the 3090

When do they say that in the video? The CPU-limited comment at 10:28 is for 1080p / 1440p.

10:41 , so 10 more seconds. I910900k bottlenecking Hitman 2 at 4K Max

It doesn't seem like that's 4K: the text on the top-right corner clearly says 1080p or 1440p next to each framerate. The narrator also says 1080p and 1440p.

It's definitely confusing, since there's a mention of 4K elsewhere...

Sure, but that drives the point further right? Already CPU bound at 1080P

No. The CPU is the bottleneck at 1080P, but the GPU might become the bottleneck at a higher resolution.

not really. cpu bound at 4K implies cpu bound at 1080p, but the converse is not true.

Simulation is not necessarily 'fringe'. Kerbal Space Program, Oxygen Not Included, heck... Dwarf Fortress (ok, the last one IS fringe).

You are correct that most games don't use that much CPU. Most titles will run comfortably with an Intel I3 from the past three generations or so, provided there are no bottlenecks in the GPU. The CPU will be the bottleneck, but if you are getting sufficient framerates, so what?

Modern CPUs are insanely powerful. Even then, I moved to Ryzen - for the above mentioned titles.

I upgraded for Crusader Kings and, especially, Stellaris on large galaxies. Simulations are a great example of needing CPU.

I run Kerbal and Dwarf Fotress on an 11 year old Xeon, as well as every other modern game with a 1070 at 2560x1600. All the eye candy on. I'm not suggesting running a decade old CPU, but it's completely silly for this presentation to be pumping expensive CPUs for 1080p gaming benefits.

The reason why they ran the benchmarks at 1080p is because they want to ensure they are not GPU bound.

I don't disagree with you but I think this AMD video focused on closing the gap with Intel's single-core performance -- and many games are still single-core.

While I agree with the general statement, I want to remark that 1080p is actually 2k if you treat 2160p as 4k.

I guess you mean 1440p - which you could maybe label as 2.6k. But I don't think there is any such designation. Calling it WQHD is probably the right thing.

If you're playing at high framerates (120Hz+) you'll find that your CPU is inadequate for many recent games.

(playing games on a 1070 and a 6 year old Xeon and feeling the lack of single-threaded performance)

It depends. I threw together an HTPC a few months ago out of mostly second-hand parts and it's been a mixed bag. With an i5-4460 and an RX 570, I can run modern shooters perfectly, but a bunch of indie games give me unexpected trouble. Hades for example (isometric roguelite heavy on visual effects) still gives me lots of slowdowns and framedrops, and I even get jitter and issues on some really old titles that I would have expected to be butter-smooth, like Sonic Generations.

The RX 570 is definitely a budget level GPU, an upgrade to that would certainly give you what you need to run those games on an I5 properly.

Sure it's a budget card, but I don't think it's the issue, because I got great performance on COD WWII (2017) when I tried it at 1080p on high settings.

Additionally, the games listed as problematic ran great on a Dell laptop equipped with an 8th-gen i7 and a GTX 1050 mobile. At least, they ran great for like a minute or two until the thermal throttling kicked in. So given that my HTPC build does have issues, and it has a slightly better GPU and much worse processor, I'm inclined to think the processor is the problem.

Unfortunately, I don't think there's much point trying to get a better processor than that for the old LGA 1150 board, when I could spend only slightly more cash on some DDR4 RAM, a B450 motherboard, and maybe an older Ryzen to be upgraded to one of these Zen 3 ones in a few years when prices have dropped.

Have you tried MS Flight Sim? That's the game that convinced me it's time to upgrade my trusty i5-4670k

Not for content creators and other workstation type applications - all those non server workstation boards are going some where right?

I personally love their cpu's for development, can run a solid IDE, have 3 browsers open, compile huge programs with many threads, run 40 docker containers next to each other, have discord, YouTube, Thunderbird etc.. open

And it keeps running smoothly! I don't know what the market share of developers is vs gamers :x

40 docker containers?? My fully spec-d out Macbook Pro could only dream of running 8 without a hiccup

Every time I code with the MBP from work I dream of using my home desktop computer instead. There's just no comparison. I have just the 3700X CPU but already that on Linux runs circles around my work laptop.

Keep in mind that Docker for Mac runs in a virtual machine, so it is much heavier than running it on Linux.

Good point.

I have yet to take the dive into buying or building a Linux workstation for development. Probably very worth it, but I have found the endless fiddling you can do with Linux to really distract me from doing the actual work I turned on the computer to do.

Debian stable has been my solution to the endless fiddling for over a decade. But it won't work for you if there's some very specific difficult-to-use-with-Linux thingamajig you need.

It’s not only endless fiddling you can do but occasinally you have to do as well.

This may not be true at all, depending on the distribution you use. You should ask a Linux user who does work similar to yours. I haven't had to "fiddle" for years, though I probably subconsciously avoid using software/hardware which I suspect may cause trouble.

Hyperbole, meant that I never had any issues with how many containers I was running haha I think I ran like 15 at most on my desktop

Mac these days is a fashion statement rather than a serious tool, plus company shady practices e.g. making devices difficult to repair, questionable design decisions e.g. running high voltage rails right next to low voltage signals to increase the likelihood of failure and then making it difficult to recover data and forcing you to use their cloud so they can analyse your data. No thanks.

Well if you look at the ancestry and lineage, they evolved from the class of single button tools .. more related to a toaster than a two button or three button work machine ;)

Which macbook do you use? Thinking about replacing my thinkpad e590 with macbook pro 16

I had (before switching jobs) the 2018 MBP with all the options maxed out.

Was running a Docker stack of about 8 containers, plus PyCharm. It worked okay-ish, but everything was maxed out all the time and the fans were always spinning. Battery was being drained even when on the charger. Pycharm would lag for a second or two here and there.

Now switched jobs and was issued a 2018 MBP with only 16GB RAM and the 2.2GHz i7. I have gone to the trouble to run everything locally (A single 200MB Python repo + Spark). I don't see the same power drain but Pycharm lags VERY hard on its indexing and code insight... sometimes 5-10 seconds.

There is a high chance you tried it, but have you adjusted memory heap?

https://www.jetbrains.com/help/pycharm/increasing-memory-hea...

Using pycharm (although with a couple of the smaller projects and the number of containers) just fine on i5-8265U (1.6 GHz base) and 16 GB of RAM. There are always tons of tabs opened in Firefox at the same time and 3440x1440 monitor. No discrete GPU.

It was painful to use Pycharm with default values.

Yeah, I gave it 8 GB and I watch the memory indicator and it rarely uses a full 2 GB.

Makes it seem like it's not a memory limitation, which I didn't really expect it to be.

Gamers appear to be the most avid and most vocal fans of any given computer technology (except maybe networking?). They're probably trying to ride the hype train.

That said, you should always wait for third party benchmarks from a source you trust, with benchmarks that relate to your production workloads. I like Anandtech, Phoronix, and Gamers Nexus for such reviews. The last, despite the name, includes a decent swath of non-gaming benchmarks, and they are incredibly transparent about benchmarking methodology, which I appreciate.

With the necessary caveat out of the way, some observations:

If the IPC gains are there, and we're seeing similar or higher clocks (which seems to be the case), then you should expect a pretty good uplift to non-gaming performance.

The cache architecture optimization should also be a boon to many workloads outside of gaming.

Now Gamers Nexus is my #1 review site despite the name. Anyway most important thing is check a similar workload benchmark for your use rather than Cinebench(if you're not CG renderer).

> Gamers appear to be the most avid and most vocal fans of any given computer technology (except maybe networking?).

Gaming is very sensitive with network latency. Bandwidth is less important, but helps for downloading and installing games.

I absolutely understand the importance of network performance in gaming.

My observation was on how vocal gamers tend to be in their excitement about hardware. I see gaming media go nuts over CPU and GPU releases. There's excitement and detailed analysis of motherboards. I've seen in depth content on storage, and there's been a lot of hype over the PS5's new storage architecture. RAM gets attention. Obviously displays get lots of attention, both from a visual quality and refresh frequency perspective. There are endless buying guides for peripherals such as mice, keyboards, and headsets.

I don't tend to see much content on networking, nor anything approaching the excitement I've seen for any of the categories above.

These observations do not diminish the importance of the network in online gaming. I merely noted that networking hardware tends to generate less vocal excitement among gamers. Beyond networking equipment, I believe gamers lead in hardware excitement.

Network performance may be important but the reality is that for the most part those things which influence network performance are out of the hands of gamers. There is "gaming" network hardware out there but for the most part I would categorize it with the $500 coax cables sold to audiophiles.

The biggest lever in the toolbox for a typical user to optimize network is good old ethernet. Wired vs wireless will typically reduce latency a little bit and massively improves on jitter, which is arguably more important for competitive gaming (within a reasonable range of latency).

Outside of that, I agree.

AMD was already ahead of intel on every other use case so they finally got gaming too.

The primary goal of this announcement isn't that Zen 3 is better than Zen 2, the goal is to show that AMD/Zen 3 is better than Intel. Zen 2 is already better at nearly all workloads, with the only exception being gaming.

They could focus on compilation benchmarks, content creation benchmarks, etc. But the people who care about those benchmarks are already going to be buying whatever the latest AMD CPU is in their segment. The only people who are going to sit down and say, "hmm, should I buy an AMD or Intel CPU?" are gamers. So that's where they're focusing their marketing budget.

I'm wondering how many non-gamers actually buy desktops. Either they use laptops or their company chooses one. I'm a non-gamer who likes desktops but am happy with my old PC and am thinking of getting a laptop for next box.

I built a small form factor PC for fun, but it's pretty much deadweight.

Having to sit down in the same chair at the same desk for an entire work session is a self-inflicted dealbreaker for me. It made more sense when laptops were so underpowered with such bad battery life. But now, gaming and exotic workloads are the only thing that really justify being tethered to a machine.

If I could go back in time, I'd save that $1000 towards a maxed out Macbook Pro and dual-boot Windows.

Lol I sit at the same chair at the same desk every day. Perhaps you just persuaded me what I should do next.

Assuming that your workloads are standard non-gaming workloads, they will probably also benefit substantially when gaming benefits. My reasoning being that a common bottleneck for gaming workloads is single thread performance, and unless this is highly focused on a single core clock boost, I'd expect that single-threaded performance increases would be multiplied appropriately by core count, though perhaps not perfectly linearly.

When you see marketing reaching for "non-gaming" metrics, it's often for highly parallelizable workloads, which benefits non-gaming disproportionately, but e.g. for compiling/linking there are still tasks that have to be done serially, which is where that single-threaded performance boost is critical.

I'm definitely excited at this point to see what a Zen 3 threadripper can bring to the table.

There was at least 5 non gaming benchmarks, like GCC, Cinebench, VRay, CAD...

> A non-gaming benchmark would have been helpful.

Like Cinebench?

Fair enough, on that point.

They did show cinebench and content creation benchmark https://youtu.be/iuiO6rqYV4o?t=1237

the single thread performance is the meat of the story here. that was the main caveat that stood in the way of an unconditional recommendation of amd over intel in the last generation. it makes sense to primarily target people (like me, incidentally) who would have bought amd last time around but for the deficit in gaming performance.

For consumer chips, gaming is where the money is, wait until it comes out and see what the benchmarks are then

What kind of intensive tasks even exist today, apart from gaming?

And on top of that, I’m slowly realizing that regular people don’t appreciate snappy computers. They don’t want to wait, but don’t want quick moves either. So things happening instantly demo might not work anyway IMO.

> And on top of that, I’m slowly realizing that regular people don’t appreciate snappy computers.

I don't think this is true. my 70yo father who couldn't care less about tech is always asking me why webpages don't load instantly even when he pays for the highest tier of internet service.

I think most people just don't have the knowledge to make hardware/software choices that reflect their desire for "snappiness". a lot of people don't understand that a laptop is inherently less powerful than a desktop, let alone how to allocate money towards cpu/ram/storage to get the best bang for their buck.

> I think most people just don't have the knowledge to make hardware/software choices that reflect their desire for "snappiness".

It's funny how an average PC will feel snappier on a 144hz monitor compared to a top of the line PC on a 60hz monitor.

It doesn't help that many retail computers have imbalanced specs, trying to sell to people looking for the highest number on a specific component (and sacrificing every other component for cost) rather than offering a well-balanced system.

Software development, machine learning, general number crunching, etc.

But, as I mentioned above, perhaps I'm just looking at the wrong product, and maybe I should be looking at Threadripper instead.

Compiling large programs. All sorts of data analytics use cases. Rendering - covers still and video. HPC. Real-time data processing.

The most mainstream application of massive computing power at home seems to be video editing.

Also because Google Chrome, Microsoft Word, Visual Studio Code and Slack don't have an FPS meter, and you rarely notice a few dropped frames, compared to games were you can easily tell performance differences.

Business PCs are determined by the company building the PC. The consumer market that actually builds their PCs is mostly gaming. They did mention content creators a couple of times.