It Is Worth It to Buy the Fast CPU

On top of that when you look at price vs performance they are way behind.

Apple may have made good strides in single core cpu performance, but they have definitely not made killer development machines imo.

It gets ridiculous quickly, really.

The larger point is the fastest may not be faster for your workload so benchmark before spending money. Your workload may be different.

Core count used to be a big difference but the ARM Procs in the Apple machines certainly meet the lower end workstation parts now. to exceed it you're spending big big money to get high core counts in the x86 space.

Proper desktop processors have lots and lots of PCI-E Lanes. The current cream of the crop Threadripper Pro 9000 series have 128 PCI-E 5.0 Lanes. A frankly enormous amount of fast connectivity.

M2 Ultra, the current closest workstation processor in Apple's lineup (at least in a comparable form factor in the Mac Pro) has 32 lanes of PCI-E 4.0 connectivity that's enhanced by being slotted into a PCI-E Switch fabric on their Mac Pro. (this I suspect is actually why there hasn't been a rework of the Mac Pro to use M3 Ultra - that they'll ditch the switch fabric for direct wiring on their next one)

Memory bandwidth is a closer thing to call here - using the Threadripper pro 9000 series as an example we have 8 channels of 6400MT/s DDR5 ECC. According to kingston the bus width of DDR5 is 64b so that'll get us ((6400 * 64)/8) = 51,200MB/s per channel; or 409.6 GB/s when all 8 channels are loaded.

On the M4 Max the reported bandwidth is 546 GB/s - but i'm not so certain how this is calculated as the maths doesn't quite stack up from the information i have (8533 MT/s, bus width of 64b, seems to point towards 68,264MB/s per channel. the reported speed doesn't neatly slot into those numbers).

In short the memory bandwidth bonus workstation processors traditionally have is met by the M4 Max, but PCI-E Extensibility is not.

In the mac world though that's usually not a problem as you're not able to load up a Mac Pro with a bunch of RTX Pro 6000s and have it be usable in MacOS. You can however load your machine with some high bandwidth NICs or HBAs i suppose (but i've not seen what's available for this platform)

It’s not that it’s worse than a “real” desktop chip. In a way it’s better you get almost comparable performance with way lower power usage.

Also the M4 Max has worse MT performance than e.g. the 14900k which is architecture ancient in relative terms and also costs a fraction

"AI" (Plus) Chromebooks?

Proper ergo is a cost concious move. It helps keep your employees able to work which saves on hiring and training. It reduces medical expenses, which affects the bottom line because large companies are usually self-insured; they pay a medical insurance company only to administer the plan, not for insurance --- claims are paid from company money.

Some people would minimize the amount spent on their core hardware so they had money to spend on fun things.

So you’d have to deal with someone whose 8GB RAM cheap computer couldn’t run the complicated integration tests but they were typing away on a $400 custom keyboard you didn’t even know existed while listening to their AirPods Max.

At one place I had a $25 no question spending limit, but sank a few months trying to buy a $5k piece of test equipment because somebody thought maybe some other tool could be repurposed to work, or we used to have one of those but it's so old the bandwidth isn't useful now, or this project is really for some other cost center and I don't work for that cost center.

Turns out I get paid the same either way.

Saving 1 second/employee/day can quickly be worth 10+$/employee/year (or even several times that). But you rarely see companies optimizing their internal processes based on that kind of perceived benefits.

Water cooler placement in a cube farm comes to mind as a surprisingly valuable optimization problem.

This is the soft fraud mentality: If a company offers meal delivery for people who are working late who need to eat at the office and then people start staying late (without working) and then taking the food home to eat, that’s not consistent with the policies.

It was supposed to be a consolation if someone had to (or wanted to, as occurred with a lot of our people who liked to sleep in) stay late to work. It was getting used instead for people to avoid paying out of pocket for their own dinners even though they weren’t doing any more work.

Which is why we can’t have nice things: People see these policies as an opportunity to exploit them rather than use them as intended.

I do think a lot of this comment section is assuming $500K TC employees at employers with infinite cash to spend, though.

Two, several tens of thousands are in the 5%-10% range. Hardly "peanuts". But I suppose you'll be happy to hear "no raise for you, that's just peanuts compared to your TC", right?

Alex St. John Microsoft Windows 95 era, created directX annnnd also built an alien spaceship.

I dimly recalled it as a friend in the games division telling me about some someone getting 5 and a 1 review scores in close succession.

Facts i could find (yes i asked an llm)

5.0 review: Moderately supported. St. John himself hosted a copy of his Jan 10, 1996 Microsoft performance review on his blog (the file listing still exists in archives). It reportedly shows a 5.0 rating, which in that era was the rare top-box mark. Fired a year later: Factual. In an open letter (published via GameSpot) he states he was escorted out of Microsoft on June 24, 1997, about 18 months after the 5.0 review. Judgment Day II alien spaceship party: Well documented as a plan. St. John’s own account (quoted in Neowin, Gizmodo, and others) describes an H.R. Giger–designed alien-ship interior in an Alameda air hangar, complete with X-Files cast involvement and a Gates “head reveal” gag. Sunk cost before cancellation: Supported. St. John says the shutdown came “a couple of weeks” before the 1996 event date, after ~$4.3M had already been spent/committed (≈$1.2M MS budget + ≈$1.1M sponsors + additional sunk costs). Independent summaries repeat this figure (“in excess of $4 million”).

So: 5.0 review — moderate evidence Fired 1997 — factual Alien spaceship build planned — factual ≈$4M sunk costs — supported by St. John’s own retrospective and secondary reporting

It’s like your friend group and time choosing a place to eat. It’s not your friends, it’s the law of averages.

But also, when I tell one of my reports to spec and order himself a PC, there should be several controls in place.

Firstly, I should give clear enough instructions that they know whether they should be spending around $600, $1500, or $6000.

Second, although my reports can freely spend ~$100 no questions asked, expenses in the $1000+ region should require my approval.

Thirdly, there is monitoring of where money is going; spending where the paperwork isn't in order gets flagged and checked. If someone with access to the company amazon account gets an above-ground pool shipped to their home, you can bet there will be questions to be answered.