What type of CPU for faster compilation time?

[trastikata]

Hello,

As the title says, I am changing my PC and I wonder what should I be looking for in the replacement CPU to improve the compilation time. I am not interested in gaming or the number of cores etc.

Or maybe to re-phrase, if I look at different benchmarks on-line, which type of test in the benchmarks is most relevant to Positron compilation time?

Thanks.

P.s. If you have a newer than my 15 years old AMD FX-8350, would you like to compile this program for comparison, which takes about 5m 12sec on my PC. 

IR_CAM.zip

[John Lawton]

Rather than just the processor, the amount of RAM may be important, in a newer PC you may well get 16GB or more. Also an SSD may help speeds things along.

John

[Wimax]

Hi Trastikata,

After more than 10 years..I switched from an i7 6700K to an i9 Ultra 285K --> your code has been compiled in ~ 1 minute 

[GDeSantis]

The program compiles in 55 seconds on my laptop that has an Intel 14th Generation I7 CPU and RTX 4060 NVIDIA graphics card.

[atomix]

The program compiles in 63 seconds on my desktop that has an Intel i7 13700K.

You should choose a processor with the highest Single Thread Rating - https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/5060vs6199vs6326/

[Fanie]

The price of the i9 Ultra 285K is considered expensive.

I checked your CPU to the I7 and it should make a significant improvement.

As mentioned, RAM is very important, I invested in a 32G ram, but have to add that Win11's memory management is very poor.  It starves my Cad (Solid Edge) which becomes slower and slower as I add features to a multi-featured drawing with lots of RAM free. Electronics is often mechanically bound too. That said, I always have quite a few windows going and a host of support apps running.

As GDeSantis said, from a performance / economic standpoint the I7 should be ok.

About 5m 12sec    gives enough time for making food, mow the lawn, wash the car, do the laundry, and other activities the wife should do    between compiles.

[RGV250]

Hi,
I have an old (2012) i5 3750 (3.4ghz) with 16gb ram Win 7. It takes 2 min 41 secs.
Unfortunately I have not yet installed Positron on the new i7 32gb win 11 so cannot compare with that yet.

Bob

[Gamboa]

Hi,

My test.

Best Regards.

[charliecoutas]

Processor   Intel(R) i5-7200U CPU @ 2.50GHz, 2701 Mhz, 2 Core(s), 4 Logical Processor(s) 8G RAM

4 minutes.

Charlie

[Wimax]

The price of the i9 Ultra 285K is considered expensive.

I checked your CPU to the I7 and it should make a significant improvement(...)

Yes, it's not an economic CPU for sure. I use my PC mainly for scientific computing. When I finally managed to upgrade my old and glorious PC, I realized that I had been living in a "limbo" for 10 years. Another factor that is not insignificant for me is that, thanks to the 3nm process, I was not forced to switch to liquid cooling.

[Dompie]

On a 11th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-11700 @ 2.50GHz (2.50 GHz) RAM16.0 GB
1m28s

Johan

[RGV250]

Hi Trastikata,
One thing springs to mind, is the file on your main drive or an external one as I had massive compile times with a different program for ESP32. Moved to C drive and much quicker.

Bob

[trastikata]

Thank you all for your responses. Now I have an idea what I should be looking for.

@RGV250
I've tried on the main C drive but it makes no difference since my secondary drive is SATA SSD too.

I've always thought since my CPU, however old, is working at 4 GHz and since it is an integer single thread computations and loops, the compilation time should not vary much anymore between most CPU's because their integer instructions are around since the 2000's. But I have missed the point that the CPU-RAM bus exchange is now much faster than my old DDR3.

What I think would be better is somehow newer generation CPU (not necessary latest i7 or i9) with highest possible clock, fastest possible RAM-CPU bus and NVMe SSD.

[Stephen Moss]

Just tried on my work PC, a Dell with Intel Ultra 5, 14 core processor (I doubt half are being used) @ 3.4GHz and 16GB RAM, and it took 1 minute and 13 seconds.

I would be surprised if you could get a new PC with less that 6 cores now, 16GB RAM is essential as Win 11 takes 7GB.
Most new PC's probably have solid state hard drives now, which is faster but not necessarily noticeable when it comes to compilation, having good data bus bandwidth is perhaps the most important thing as you a can have a good processor and SSD drive but if the RAM access times/data bus is slow that that will kill the performance as the bottle neck come in moving data between the processor and the RAM.

But I doubt any of that really matters too much as now every iteration of PC general has improvements in all areas (people expect it) and so the performance of pretty much any off the shelf PC's these days is so good you will notice a substantial improvement over a 15 year old PC.

[midali]

Win10, I7-6700 , 32Gb RAM, GTX1060 - 130 sec

[Pepe]

MACBook Air Apple M1 8gb with w11 instaled in UTM 4 minutes