[hishnash]

Gamers might the most vocal high-end PC users out there but they are not the people with the most money.

The threadripper is not targeted at gamers. It is targeted at people who make money from using their machines, these people can, therefore, afford to upgrade.

Consider a user who does video work. (most modern films and tv is filmed in 8k know) if this is in Raw format as it comes off the camera for a 90 min episode that is 6000 GB. Working on this data (tone mapping, cutting, etc) needs all this data to be fed in and out of the (CPU and or GPUs) so all these PCI lanes are there so you can have very fast access to the raw data and still have space for 2 or 4 full speed GPUs to do that work for you.

Forget games no game developer optimizes their games for 4 GPUs these days even Nvida have said that they dont realy want people to do more than 2GPUs in SLI.

[drewg123]

I do a lot of compiles of a codebase which is pretty big (Netflix version of FreeBSD). A full recompile takes me ~1 hr on my box (Xeon E5-2630 v3, 8 cores, 16 threads, 32GB DDR4). Most of this is a parallel make that is 100% CPU bound. So I'm probably going to update to thread ripper when it comes out. Doubling my core count should come close to halving my compile times.

I probably will do storage via a ZFS array of small-ish SSDs or NVME drives. I started with a ZFS array of spinning drives when I built this machine ~2 years ago, with an SSD for L2 ARC. I was occasionally IO bound, so I moved most of the build stuff onto its own SSD. That's probably enough, but I want redundancy (without spinning drives to back up to), and I suck at cabling, so I'm leaning towards just using NVME drives in PCIe slots in order to avoid the cables.

[maksimum]

> A full recompile takes me ~1 hr

Could you explain why full recompiles on a single machine are necessary? Are you testing different compiler settings?

[drewg123]

I work remotely, and it is easier to develop and compile on the same box. I normally compile just the kernel, but occasionally have to rebuild the entire thing.

[yazr]

What makefile/build system r u using ?

I am curious since i did some work on parallel builds and I always wonder how much of this is (easily) transferable to other setups...

[drewg123]

A modified version of the standard FreeBSD build, with bsd make. Eg, a script driven 'make -j X buildworld && make -j X buildkernel'

[yazr]

if you had access to a hosted build system, which is x10 faster. lets even assume some sort of transparent gradual sync of your source tree, and the binaries back to your system.

would u find value in such a setup or is it not worth the hassle ?

(lets assume the output is veritably binary-identical to your local build)