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Comment by LoSboccacc | Hacker News Reader

> Milticore performance gets more and more important with time.

no? above 2-4 core it's just marketing hype like it was ten years ago already and today if you need parallel processing you have vastly powerful resources to tap.

sure this amd cpu might be faster in 3d rendering or video encoding or other task that use 4+ cores and that might be useful if you truly can't move them onto a gpu but truth is at the top end many-cores architectures are getting squeezed out by streaming processors and the workloads that have a hard dependency on many core single node general processor are rarer by the day.

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Threadripper is proven to do extremely well in parallel compilation benchmarks -- the Linux kernel build process being the chief example. I've seen the numbers on at least 4 sites (Phoronix included).

It's not only about 3D. We're talking everyday programmer productivity, partially achieved by less waiting around when compiling your projects.

> everyday programmer productivity

> the Linux kernel build process

Yea, what is this BS Linux kernel build process that is a known metric that everyone can test against? I compile projects dozens of times a day at my work and never once I compiled the linux kernel...

It's an extreme case to demonstrate if a CPU's multicore performance is clearly better than previous generations.

For what it's worth, I migrated from a consumer-grade i7 CPU to a workstation-grade Xeon and the differences in compile speeds in my everyday projects (less than 400 files) are still significant and very noticeably in favour of the Xeon.

Linux kernel compilation is just a benchmark that multiplies such differences between CPUs. Thus the buyers can -- hopefully -- make a more informed decision.

weird, I've a 9000+ files maven monster and intellij incremental build means I've never have to wait for compilation during normal operations, and this is with a meager i7 8550u

Well, it's an incremental build. I am talking occasionally changing dependencies in a project written in a dynamic-but-compiled language, which leads to full rebuilds. The difference was big.

It also has tooling for "watching" test directories and auto re-running tests when certain files are changed -- which utilises incremental compilation under the hood and there indeed there is no visible compilation performance difference.

Yeah, I know it is, and said pretty much what you said...

Seems I didn't catch the sarcasm, sorry. :D

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