Скачать или смотреть You should buy a faster CPU

You should buy a faster CPU. Someone last week, I think it was Howard John on his blog, said that CPUs have gotten incredibly fast in the past few years, but most people still use older mobile chips either by choice or because work gives them old laptops. If your company gives you a laptop, you are probably stuck with it for a while and that is why old hardware lasts so long. In my case, I use an old laptop by choice, and I am streaming on YouTube with it right now and it works fine, so I do not think my productivity is suffering.

AI coding subscriptions like Cursor are really popular, but let us look at the numbers. Cursor costs 480 dollars a year for a team plan, and Howard is comparing that to the price of a top CPU, like the Ryzen 9 9950X, which is about 500 dollars. With a senior US engineer’s salary, a one percent productivity increase is worth more than 500 dollars a year, so the logic is, even a tiny boost pays for itself.

But if you buy a good CPU, you do not pay yearly and the chip will last for years, so the cost per year is much lower. Howard shows some benchmarks and says you should get the fastest you can, but I think most people do not need a super fast CPU unless they are doing stuff like compiling the Linux kernel all day or running heavy workloads. If you do need big power, you can just rent a cloud server for a few hours instead of buying new hardware.

That is what I do, I use my old laptop, and if I need to do something heavy, I just pay for a few minutes of a really fast machine in the cloud, then download what I need. It is true that a desktop CPU is about three times faster than a laptop CPU, and new CPUs really are much faster than three years ago, but unless you need that power all day, renting makes more sense and saves money.