In the past few years, CPUs have gotten really fast. Shockingly fast! Yet most people are stuck on previous generation mobile chips (whether by choice, or by their companies choice), at a huge detriment to their productivity.
Meanwhile, AI coding subscriptions like Cursor are all the rage these days. I'll skip the debate on exactly how useful these tools are, and focus on the pricing. Cursor is $480/year for the team plan (the cheapest corporate plan), and other providers are around the same, setting a clear price point: engineering productivity is worth at least $500/year.
This makes sense, as given the typical salary of a senior (US-based) software engineer, you don't even need to be 1% more efficient for that investment to pay off.
Meanwhile, the top end CPU, AMD Ryzen 9 9950X, is only $500. Practically speaking it will last longer, but I believe typically corporations amortize the cost of development machines over 3 years putting it at only $170/year - a bargain compared to AI!.
Buy the fast CPU! It is well worth it.
Below shows some benchmarks for 3 machines:
- The fastest laptop my former employee would give me in 2024 (i7-1165G7, released in 2020; my employer clearly didn't follow my advice to give engineers top end CPUs!).
- The fastest ThinkPad I could buy in 2024 (AMD Ryzen 7840U).
- The fastest desktop CPU I could buy in 2025 (AMD Ryzen 9950x).
The gap is incredible -- over a 10x difference in many cases! The difference between waiting 3s for a build vs 30s is game-changing, as is the difference between 3s and 300ms.
As a general rule of thumb I have seen:
- Desktop CPUs are about 3x faster than laptop CPUs
- Top end CPUs are about 3x faster than the comparable top end models 3 years ago
- This applies to cloud VMs as well; each new generations are 2-3x faster for many workloads and usually the same price!
If you can justify an AI coding subscription, you can justify buying the best tool for the job.