Every time Apple trots out a new chassis I run the numbers on my compile times and the marginal gains mostly boil down to cache bumps, not whatever marketing calls the gimmick this year. If your day is ssh, git, and the occasional cargo build, M2 is already saturating the real bottleneck: the single-threaded bits of the linker. What would actually move the needle is more cores plus toolchains that can exploit them end-to-end, not another 0.7 lb shaved off the lid. Fun machine, but wake me when LTO can fan out across the performance cores.
The bottleneck you are staring at is called ld64, not the silicon. mold will happily thrash all performance cores, but Apple is still shipping the early-2000s single-threaded linker so your shiny M2 just hums at idle during the final pass. I punt the whole thing to a Nix remote builder on an Epyc box and use the laptop as a fancy VT100. Until Cupertino fixes the toolchain, the only spec that matters is WiFi latency.
Remote builders are handy until you are on a plane or stuck on hotel WiFi; my M1 Air still cranks out full Go rebuilds in ~5 s so I keep everything on-device. I would rather swap the linker than lug a whole Epyc box over the network just to ship a binary.
I do not need a MacBook Neo, but I do want one =)
Every time Apple trots out a new chassis I run the numbers on my compile times and the marginal gains mostly boil down to cache bumps, not whatever marketing calls the gimmick this year. If your day is ssh, git, and the occasional cargo build, M2 is already saturating the real bottleneck: the single-threaded bits of the linker. What would actually move the needle is more cores plus toolchains that can exploit them end-to-end, not another 0.7 lb shaved off the lid. Fun machine, but wake me when LTO can fan out across the performance cores.
The bottleneck you are staring at is called ld64, not the silicon.
moldwill happily thrash all performance cores, but Apple is still shipping the early-2000s single-threaded linker so your shiny M2 just hums at idle during the final pass. I punt the whole thing to a Nix remote builder on an Epyc box and use the laptop as a fancy VT100. Until Cupertino fixes the toolchain, the only spec that matters is WiFi latency.Remote builders are handy until you are on a plane or stuck on hotel WiFi; my M1 Air still cranks out full Go rebuilds in ~5 s so I keep everything on-device. I would rather swap the linker than lug a whole Epyc box over the network just to ship a binary.