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Comment by opencl | Hacker News Reader

Phoronix does compilation benchmarks (for the Linux kernel and LLVM), the existing Ryzen chips do perform quite well on them. The i5-8400 is probably the closest thing on the chart to your 8850h.

But there are diminishing returns to adding more cores past a certain point which will depend on your codebase and compiler. If your builds are at 100% CPU utilization most of the time then you will probably see pretty large gains, but sometimes a significant chunk of the time ends up being bottlenecked by single threaded performance.

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ryzen-37...

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> But there are diminishing returns to adding more cores past a certain point which will depend on your codebase and compiler. If your builds are at 100% CPU utilization most of the time then you will probably see pretty large gains, but sometimes a significant chunk of the time ends up being bottlenecked by single threaded performance.

You should check out Phoronix's Rome benchmarks. Compilers seem to love L3 cache, and the new Threadripper parts have 128MB of it. https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd-epyc...

The Epyc 7502 in that chart is going to be roughly equivalent to the 32-core Threadripper 3 announced today. Both are 32 cores with 128MB of L3, but the Threadripper part has a much higher base & turbo clock speed so it'd compile even faster. Probably.

Does linux compilation take a few minutes? The chart there says Ryzen 3 2200G takes 242 seconds to compile the whole kernel. I find that difficult to believe.

Phoronix tests compiling the upstream default config which is pretty barebones. A normal kernel build for a desktop machine will take much longer because there are more modules enabled.

Thanks for the comparison. How do you know the 8850h is desktop equivalent to the i5-8400? I can't seem to find it in the chart.

Passmark benchmarks are usually a good indicator [0]. They're also from the same generation and have the same number of cores.

[0] https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-i5-8400-vs-Intel-...

Ah great, thanks. It's actually very helpful. I was actually looking at the Passmark score a week ago, but couldn't tell if it's trustworthy. Nice to get an endorsement.

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