Having cool technology can give you fuzzy feelings, but please, don’t get distracted by that which doesn’t actually matter for it to work well and keep working well for your use. I have some cool technology myself, it’s collecting dust in an unused room of our house. Or, I’m even using some unusual tech right now, my processor’s apparently a limited edition (I’ve read on Wikipedia hours ago, after using this computer for years), that Intel had recalled shortly after release and superseded with bug-fixed models (no, not that fix). But, it’s not great, the modern web (especially incredulously awful YouTube) has just become too much of a resource drain on this small machine.
Fortunately enough, Arrow Lake’s 245K (or non-K of that realm) does seem like a good choice for what you have planned—maybe.
i’ll echo Wirko’s sentiment, you’d need to look a bit deeper than that. It’s a shame that media and many reviewers as well as commentators often cloud the waters even further with seemingly helpful simplifications. It’s something I’ve struggled with for years when I’ve started out and I think I’ve only resolved it once I got gud enough so I basically know better than those people anyways.
(And frankly, I often instead defer and say, I don’t know, cause, that’s my next point.)
So yeah, programming can mean different things. Rust, C, C++, Python, Perl, JS? As others have mentioned, it often involves container stuff these days—which I guess is true, I just wouldn’t have had this on my mind, since I’ve never programmed like this.
Some languages have made a name of themselves for how awfully long they take to compile (and this can not always be sped up though parallelization), other stuff profits from more cores, cache and memory bandwith very much.
Some five years ago (maybe more, maybe someone will date it) when I last read up on it, the heaviest programs (Firefox, Chrome) in full LTO-mode, would take more than 16GiB of your RAM to be put together at the end and swapping was OK but not great (from what I remember). This amount of RAM was still somewhat big for consumers back then. I don’t think requirements have gone up infinitely after that; in fact, Thin-LTO had pushed them down quite a bit without forfeiting at least some of the benefits. Fortunately enough, 32GiB is considered kinda the standard “premium” loadout by now, it feels, with many who actually want to program saying they’ve gone 64- or even 128-. (And this was maybe a year ago, or so.)
I can’t stress enough that I have no clue whereto they’re even moving all their memory. It’s incomprehensible for me. VMs? For what? I guess if you need to deploy multi-platform, you could have all your tests run in parallel and have that go even faster when you do have enough cores? That’s the thinking when time is money, in which case you’d probably go high end.
Now, since I do at least somewhat keep up with my personal interests in programming, but am very focused in my preferences on leanness (while being feature rich and comfortable to use) end efficiency, and since I use utterly weak machines myself (your thing has twice as many cores as mine and they’re also faster each), I’m wary of serving you dumb advice, even though, I’ve been in the general vicinity of programming for almost twenty years now.
You already have a computer. Where are your actual bottlenecks? What’s keeping you from making progress, having fun, whatever? Is there any technology you want to use but can’t? (I couldn’t realistically compile any modern browser on this half-tablet, though I’ve compiled a couple of kernels for my own use and I just had to wait.)
Like, there is no single “good for programming build” I believe (that’d be wild). Are you lacking cores, speed-per-core (mostly frequency), memory bandwidth, memory quantity?
When you don’t use heavy tools—yes, this might sound very trivial—programming can be lightweight. Even if you attempt to throw hardware at sluggishness, you might find that switching editors does yield better results.
So, sorry for not deciding much of anything for you … my posts sometimes grow large like this without intent (I haven’t planned it out in advance)—but I think, you might either be sweating it too much or not enough. Find out where you’re hurting today, if you’re hurting at all. The 245K will serve you well as a default, but, if you’re not really pushing any boundaries today, then you have to say, so might anything even cheaper you can get your hands on. (Maybe some trusted person to inherit it from, instead of the wide net?)
Or, if your junk still works, maybe don’t buy anything at all? Do you want to game? If you can game on it, you can do non-money-earning, not utterly serious programming on it, I reckon.
I’ve been hurt more often and more strongly by a lack of RAM (4GiB in here, 8GiB in the newer device, with another 8GiB in a drawer ready to be installed after warranty’s end) than by a lack of grunt, though again, kernel compilation on a 1P4E Alder Lake Pentium did take surprisingly long, that was a bummer for sure.
Yet, I have to insist, if you want to learn programming right now, it’s either you go a traditional route, where HW requirements will be modest enough that your old rig should get it, or you’ll go down the AI route, in which case … doesn’t most of that stuff run on someone else’s computers, so you’re mostly fighting ridiculously abominatious misgivings of programs whose code is so awful that it just takes (a literal) ten times more power than it otherwise would, though apart from that, you don’t need much?
Yeah, I guess ARL can manage that as good (and bad) as anything else.
For running AI stuff locally, you should probably rather look towards spending money on your accelerator (graphics card). You might not even need to update your system for that, go check out how much your slow system memory and PCIe3 bus actually limit your GPU of choice, it’s possibly not much at all. (Or maybe it is, feel free to let me know.)
