# Best compiler CPU currently?

## msst

Hmm, I am still running a now fairly old intel desktop with a Intel Core i7-3770K and was wondering how much I could reasonably gain by upgrading this old rig. What would currently be the best setup for good compiler power? Most benchmarks seem to be made for office or gaming power.

It seems a Ryzen7 would offer about twice the performance in the gaming benchmarks for a reasonable price, but how much in terms of compiler time? Is there a good comparison?

If price did not matter at all using a Threadripper 2950 would probably be best, but it seems all components for such a setup are quite pricey, not to speak of the processor alone.

Would you update at all or just keep the old rig running for more years until intel has fixed their cpu gate and 16 core processors get less pricey?

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## NeddySeagoon

msst,

Zen2 (Ryzen3xxx) in due out in June. Wait for the dust to settle around that.

Its got lots of new shiny features ... PCIe Gen 4, for go faster I/O.

I'm not sure a Threadripper is good value for money in compiling. Its really difficult to keep those threads busy.

I've had the opportunity to try a system with 96 physical cores and 128G RAM.

Calculating the depgraph is single threaded, so it uses at most one core.

The ./configure stage is single threaded.

All those extra cores/threads go to waste during those stages.

As the  cores/threads count rises, so does the amount of RAM you need.

Think 2G RAM per thread for C++.

Its worth waiting for the price realignment when Zen2 is out, even if you decide not to get Zen2.

PCIe Gen 4 needs new chipsets and motherboards. Wait for the major issues to be resolved.

I'm hanging on to my Phenom II system that will be 10 years old in a few days, for a few more months.

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## Tony0945

 *NeddySeagoon wrote:*   

> msst,
> 
> Zen2 (Ryzen3xxx) in due out in June. Wait for the dust to settle around that.
> 
> Its got lots of new shiny features ... PCIe Gen 4, for go faster I/O.
> ...

 

Ryzen 2700X prices are already dropping. I'm planning on buying one to put on my B350 mobo that still has the cheapie $50 bulldozer AM4 that I bought instead of a Zen during all the commotion about dates and returns. 

Like you I have a Phenom II X6. I think mine is 11 years old. Was thinking of B450 and Ryzen 3, but I'm gunshy from the botched Ryzen launch.

I recently started virtualbox instead of dual-booting for Windoze for applications that don't support Linux. I mention this because extra cores to assign to virtualbox is also a consideration.

IMHO, 6 or 8 (I lean to 8 physical cores) cores are ideal. Of course, YMMV. Cheers!

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## msst

 *Quote:*   

> Calculating the depgraph is single threaded, so it uses at most one core.
> 
> The ./configure stage is single threaded.
> 
> All those extra cores/threads go to waste during those stages. 

 

That is true and already painfully noticable. Mainly the bigships such as libreoffice and co. will profit from many cores. So we need both a high single-core performance and many cores ideally. I could imagine 16 cores / 32 threads to be good with 32 GB ram for the big packages, but I also found the threadripper too pricey as its single core performance is not really good and it does not end at the cpu price.

I found in the meantime a kernel compile comparison:

https://openbenchmarking.org/showdown/pts/build-linux-kernel-1.9.0

Seems a Ryzen 2700X would be a bit more than twice as fast (75 vs 167 seconds) as my current rig and a threadripper would be around 47 seconds and such 3x as fast). The fastest seem to be the xeon gold/platinum high end server systems for a fortune at 25 seconds compile time.

So even after so many years still very costly to get something that is significantly faster. If these xeon gold 32 core cpus could become severely outdated and drop to small prices 2nd hand they might become an options, but it seems they are even 2nd hand still super expensive. Ryzen 2700X is on the moment the most economic option but the speed advantage is limited. Time to wait longer I also tend to think.

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## bammbamm808

My 2700x is great for emerges. 32GB ram helps and I can use -j16 for most packages, setting lower numbers individually where needed. Last I checked, it was doing Chromium in about 40 min. As noted, prices are dropping.

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## Tony0945

 *bammbamm808 wrote:*   

> Ryzen 2700x
> 
> 32Gb Samsung B-die (16GB dual rank x2) DDR4
> 
> Geforce GTX 1060 6GB
> ...

 

Sweet Rig! Although I prefer Western Digital.

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## bammbamm808

 *Tony0945 wrote:*   

>  *bammbamm808 wrote:*   Ryzen 2700x
> 
> 32Gb Samsung B-die (16GB dual rank x2) DDR4
> 
> Geforce GTX 1060 6GB
> ...

 

I'm a Noctua guy, so big heatsink, slow big fans in push-pull and 5 more 120mm slow fans for massiive quiet case airflow. I'm very happy with it. Gentoo was the whole reason I went Ryzen, well and the overwhelming price/performance advantage. I've also moved / to an NVME pcie-3.0 m.2 drive cause a cheap one popped up in my Amazon spam. I didn't expect a noticeable speed difference, and didn't get one, but it was quite cheap and I've wanted to play around with the format for a while.

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