Absolutely. Most development work for these things is just fine on a laptop.
Each processor family has its own supported SIMD instructions though. For a long time, SSE / AVX / AVX2 were the only game in town on x86. AVX-512 introduced in Skylake was primarily available only on server parts, and was a mixed bag, and didn't have support on AMD machines until just recently (with Genoa / Zen4).
A modern Mac laptop with an M-series chip will have ARM NEON vector instructions, just like on an iPhone or similar. There is a new-ish ARM vector instruction set called Scalable Vector Extensions (SVE) that Apple doesn't support, but Graviton 3 does. But generally improvements on your laptop often translate onto the server side, and you can definitely test correctness.
There are a few least-common denominator SIMD libraries out there, but realistically for many problems, you'll get the most mileage from writing some intrinsics yourself for your target platform.
Each processor family has its own supported SIMD instructions though. For a long time, SSE / AVX / AVX2 were the only game in town on x86. AVX-512 introduced in Skylake was primarily available only on server parts, and was a mixed bag, and didn't have support on AMD machines until just recently (with Genoa / Zen4).
A modern Mac laptop with an M-series chip will have ARM NEON vector instructions, just like on an iPhone or similar. There is a new-ish ARM vector instruction set called Scalable Vector Extensions (SVE) that Apple doesn't support, but Graviton 3 does. But generally improvements on your laptop often translate onto the server side, and you can definitely test correctness.
There are a few least-common denominator SIMD libraries out there, but realistically for many problems, you'll get the most mileage from writing some intrinsics yourself for your target platform.