One exception nowadays: Business notebooks - and that’s only because the rest of the notebook market went to shit. If you want a somewhat compact notebook with more than 64GB of RAM, decent CPU performance and good battery life Apple currently is the only one offering something.
Helsinki is getting out of the “burning stuff to make electricity” business. It used to have coal power plants - last ones closed down in 2023 and 2024. There are some dedicated plants for district heating still, but also there’s the trend to move away from burning stuff.
The space used by the smallest solar charger I’ve seen on Amazon seems to be similar to 6 or more batteries in the format the N900 was taking - so if you look at space, slow charging from solar charger, and reliance on sun conditions taking individual batteries seems to be the better option for a few days hike. It’s also easier to stow individual batteries to wherever you still have space left.
With my N900 I used to travel with 6 to 10 charged batteries to have a few days of runtime. Things got better now with powerbanks - but for something like hiking just carrying a few spares would still be smaller and lighter.
I did not sign with them after I had some issues with the contract provided, and the resulting interactions with my future manager. I’d say at least for someone from Europe the company culture is less than ideal from that encounter.
AMD keeps some older generations in production as their budget options - and as they had excellent CPUs for multiple generations now you also get pretty good computers out of that. Even better - with some planning you’ll be able to upgrade to another CPU later when checking chipset lifecycle.
AMD has established by now that they deliver what they promise - and intel couldn’t compete with them for a few generations over pretty much the complete product line - so they can afford now to have the bleeding edge hardware at higher prices. It’s still far away from what intel was charging when they were dominant 10 years ago - and if you need that performance for work well worth the money. For most private systems I’d always recommend getting last gen, though.
This doesn’t have anything to do with user control - modern windows versions need drivers to be WHQL signed to get that kind of access. Alternatively you’ll need to enable developer mode on your system, and install your own developer certificate into its keyring for running own code, which has its own drawbacks.
Crowdstrike is implemented as a device driver - but as there is no device Microsoft could’ve argued that this is abusing the APIs, and refused the WHQL certification. Microsofts own security solution (Defender) also is implemented as a device driver, though, and that’s what the EU ruling is about: Microsoft needs to provide the same access they’re using in their own products to competitors. Which is a good thing - but if Microsoft didn’t have Defender, or they’d have done it without that type of access it’d have been fully legal for them to deny the certification for Crowdstrike.
Both MacOS and Linux have the ability to run the type of thing that requires those privileges on Windows in an unprivileged process - and on newer Linux versions Crowdstrike is using that (older versions got broken by them the same way they now broke Windows). So Microsoft now trying to blame the EU can be seen as an attempt to keep people from questioning why Microsoft didn’t implement a low privilege API as well, which would’ve prevented this whole mess.
I have a 96 core one. While it’ll be fine as a desktop for compiling I’d stick with an AMD system.
The devkit has 6 memory channels, and you’ll want to fill them all - there’s a surprisingly high performance penalty if you don’t. Even then, compiling a code base which could be spread over hundreds of cores is still significantly slower on the ampere compared to my old 3970x.
And as soon as I learned about that I stopped using it. Turns out it was the right choice - since then more then one company had breaches where authenticator seeds extracted from a google account were used to bypass 2fa.
You still had a 4GB memory limit for processes, as well as a total memory limit of 64GB. Especially the first one was a problem for Java apps before AMD introduced 64bit extensions and a reason to use Sun servers for that.
As a non-Windows-user I see that as a good thing. LLMs are not going away - but that kind of nonsense at least will make sure all PCs will eventually have cheap and reasonably fast AI acceleration. Which is required for killing off centrally hosted LLMs (plus nvidias cash grabbing)
Intel is well known for requiring a new board for each new CPU generation, even if it is the same socket. AMD on the other hand is known to push stuff to its physical limits before they break compatibility.
Not just that - intel did dual core CPUs as a response to AMD doing just that, by gluing two cores together. Which is pretty funny when you look at intels 2017 campaign of discrediting ryzen by calling it a glued together CPU.
AMDs Opteron was wiping the floor with intel stuff for years - but not every vendor offered systems as they got paid off by intel. I remember helping a friend with building a kernel for one of the first available Opteron setups - that thing was impressive.
And then there’s the whole 64bit thing which intel eventually had to license from AMD.
Most of the big CPU innovations (at least in x86 space) of the last decade were by AMD - and the chiplet design of ryzen is just another one.
One fascinating example is one owner that replaced the DC barrel jack with a USB-C port, so they could utilize USB-PD for external power.
Oddly enough that’s also an example for bad design in that notebook: The barrel jack is soldered in. With a module that is plugged into the board that’d be significantly easier to replace - and also provide strain relief for power jack abuse. All my old thinkpads were trivial to move to USB-C PD because they use a separate power jack with attached cable.
The transparent bottom also isn’t very functional - it is pretty annoying to remove and put back, due to the large amount of screws required. For a notebook designed for tinkering I’d have wanted some kind of quick release for that. Also annoying is the lack of USB ports on the board - there’s enough space to integrate a USB hub, but just doing that on the board and providing extra ports would’ve been way more sensible.
The CPU module also is a bit of a mixed bag - it pretty much is designed for the first module they developed, and later modules don’t have full support for the existing ports. I was expecting that, though - many projects trying to offer that kind of modular upgrade path run into that sooner or later, and for that kind of small project with all its teething problems ‘sooner’ was to be expected. It still is very interesting for some prototyping needs - but that’s mostly companies or very dedicated hackers, not the average linux user.
No, most companies also have mostly incompetent engineers.
Roku always was a company with great engineers and shitty money grabbing management. The new user creation always requested data not necessary for basic operation.
I find this situation rather entertaining. It shows yet again how important it is to educate people on the basics of how LLM work, including how they are being executed - I’m guessing with just a tiny bit more knowledge it’d also have been obvious nonsense to you.
Not entirely sure about that. I have a bunch of systems with the current 8cx, and that’s pretty much 10 years behind Apple performance wise, while being similar in heat and power consumed. It is perfectly fine for the average office and webbrowsing workload, though - a 10 year old mobile i7 still is an acceptable CPU for that nowadays, the more problematic areas of IO speed are better with the Snapdragon. (That’s also the reason why Apple is getting away with that 8GB thing - the performance impact caused by that still keeps a usable system for the average user. The lie is not that it doesn’t work - the lie is that it doesn’t have an impact).
From the articles I see about the Snapdragon Elite it seems to have something like double the multicore performance of the 8cx - which is a nice improvement, but still quite a bit away from catching up to the Apple chips. You could have a large percentage of office workers use them and be happy - but for demanding workloads you’d still need to go intel/AMD/Apple. I don’t think many companies will go for Windows/Arm when they can’t really switch everybody over. Plus, the deployment tools for ARM are not very stable yet - and big parts of what you’d need for doing deployments in an organization have just been available for ARM for a few months now (I’ve been waiting for that, but didn’t have a time to evaluate if they’re working).
It also is perfectly fine for running a few minute long compile cycles - without running into thermal throttling. I guess if you do some hour long stuff it might eventually become an issue - but generally the CPUs available in the Airs seem to be perfectly fine with passive cooling even for longer peak loads. Definitely usable as a developer machine, though, if you can live with the low memory (16GB for the M1, which I have).
I bought some Apple hardware for a customer project - which was pretty much first time seriously touching Apple stuff since the 90s, as i’m not much of a friend of them - and was pretty surprised about performance as well as lack of heat. That thing is now running Linux, and it made me replace my aging Thinkpad x230 with a Macbook Pro - where active cooling clearly is required, but you also get a lot of performance out of it.
The real big thing is that they managed to scale power usage nicely over the complete load range. For the Max/Ultra variants you get comparable performance (and power draw/heat) on high load to the top Ryzen mobile CPUs - but for low load you still get a responsive system at significantly less power draw than the Ryzens.
Intel is playing a completely different game - they did manage to catch up a bit, but generally are still running hot, and are power hogs. Currently it’s just a race between Apple and AMD - and AMD is gimped by nobody building proper notebooks with their CPUs. Prices Apple is charging for RAM and SSDs are insane, though - they do get additional performance out of their design (unlike pretty much all x86 notebooks, where soldered RAM will offer the same throughput as a socketed on), but having a M.2 slot for a lower speed extra SSD would be very welcome.
Screen is another thing - but I can live with that, mostly - it’s a bit hard to find x86 notebooks with decent resolution (not talking retina style, just better than “1080p on a 14 inch display”). And while the screen itself is nice on the apples I’d prefer a lower resolution one if I can get a matte screen instead.
But fact is that nobody wants to sell you a proper x86 notebook. It’s almost impossible to find something with more than 32GB of RAM, and while there are a few with more than 64GB they’re all xeon based monsters larger than 16", as far as I can tell can’t really be ordered, and have a price tag equal or larger to a full spec 14" mac book pro. And obviously you can’t really think about battery life with intels space heaters.
It’s especially sad as current mobile Ryzen CPUs could very well compete with Apples ARM CPUs - the one thing Apple is better at is the absolute low power state, as soon as it has too actually do something the power (and TDP) curve is very close to mobile Ryzen. But pretty much every manufacturer fucks up the thermal design, or gimps it in other ways.