Quote from: Frans on April 03, 2020, 16:20:04
Quote from: Greg on April 03, 2020, 16:16:25
We're tired of gaming laptops with nvidia GPUs. Can we get laptops without graphics cards now? Just the Renoir APU. thanks
That would be fantastic. A Ryzen 4000H without any dGPU would be great for compiling or any other CPU/Cor- bound work.
Wait, people actually compile large programs without any access to the internet or a corp network? At all? We've moved towards cloud-based compilation years ago, even at university, this has long been a thing. This way, developers with cheap ARM chromebooks can do the same quality of work as someone who blew $3000 on a Macbook Pro.
This also ensures the code can work with the entire dev/prod infrastructure, which is also cloud-based (and very unlikely to be completely resident on a single laptop).
In the end, asymmetrically increasing CPU power in a laptop makes very little sense. An U series 15/25W chip makes far more sense in this application, since compilation is still largely single threaded. One can compile a massive system using multiple threads, but that usually only happens a few times, to onboard a project onto a new dev system. Most individual code contributions are only compilable using a single thread, anyways, so the single threaded boost of an U series is more than enough. That is, if the system is only compiled locally on an individual laptop, for whatever reason.
This is what we have seen in the real world. Using a different example, even Linux kernel developers don't have to deal much with massive compilation times (after initial) - most changes only require recompiling a very small part of the kernel.
That being said, maybe something like Unreal Engine or Unity is less flexible, but those are also GPU-heavy development environments.