Re:Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBoo...
by ComputerGuru on Friday December 29, 2023 @10:55PM
(#38812706)
I guess I should clarify: I am a rust and C++ developer blocked on compilation time, but even then, I am not able to justify the cost of upgrading from a 1950X/128GB DDR4 (good guess!) to the 7950X or 3D. It would be faster, but not in a way that would translate to $$$ directly. (Not to mention the inflation in TRx costs since AMD stopped playing catch-up.) performance-per-watt isn’t interesting to me (except for thermals but Noctua has me covered) because I pay real-time costs and it’s not a build farm.
If I had 100% CPU consumption around the clock, I would upgrade in a heart beat. But I’m working interactively in spurts between hitting CPU walls and the spurts don’t justify the upgrade.
If I were to upgrade it would be for the sake of non-work CPU video encoding or to get PCIe 5.0 for faster model loading to GPU VRAM.
Re:Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBoo...
by washadjeffmad on Saturday December 30, 2023 @09:11PM
(#38821146)
sTR4 workstations are hard to put down! I'll replace mine one day, probably with whatever ASRock Rack Epyc succeeds the ROMED8-2T with PCIe 5.0.
In the meantime, I wanted something more portable, so I put a 13700K and RTX 3090 in a Lian Li A4-H2O case with an eDP side panel for a nice mITX build. It only needs one cable for power, and it's as great for VR as it is a headless host.
If you would not significantly benefit from upgrading, it's only because you already have more CPU performance than you need. Today's CPUs are significantly better than first-generation Zen in performance per clock and raw clock speed, and mainstream consumer desktop platforms can now match the top first-generation Threadripper in CPU core count and total DRAM bandwidth (and soon, DRAM capacity). There's no performance or power metric by which a Threadripper 1950X (not quite 6.5 years old) beats a Ryzen 7950X. And the 7950X also comes in a mobile package that only sacrifices a bit of performance (to fit into fairly chunky "laptops").