I mean I have a crappy 7 year old CPU that I use for single threaded dev, and it works for 99% of cases. In the 1% of cases, I threw on multithreading and its fine.
Now my daily driver has a GPU and it unlocks new possibilities.
Its been over 10 years since I've really spent time thinking about a CPU.
I compile C++ code with an AMD 2400G (zen1+) and parallel builds are way faster than single threaded. I also used the same box to add a bunch of parallel paths to the code (using OpenMP) which improved performance of the app by 3x-4x in some cases with little effort.
Compiling a full build is 30-60 seconds for me. If I turn on LTO it's several minutes and that's with parallel builds -j
I'm aiming to get a Zen4 or Zen5 with 8 cores one of these days. That should give about 4x speed boost. The new GPU has AV1 support too!
Not only that, but parallel builds on newer CPUs is way faster than parallel builds on 7 year old CPUs, even at lower clock speeds.
I did not change mine for 6 years, but looking at some benchmarks, it looks like compilation times would not get more than a few percents faster per generation. I expect to get maybe 20% faster with a recent CPU in the same price range.
Until 2005 I was updating the CPU every 2-3 years, then every 5 years, and when I'll get the next one I plan to keep it 10 years easy.
This is the biggest difference I see today. In the previous generation it was a huge boost in everything just becauase the old CPU was really old. I also keep CPUs 5 years or more.
Speaking as a 7800X3D owner, I don't think any CPU on the planet is sufficient for modded Rimworld yet.
One would think its all GPU. But you'd be suprised how single-core-speed limited parts of certain tasks are.