[gsnedders]

It's Chromium 56 with the default Chromium build-chain.

At that point, Chromium required Visual Studio 2015 Update 3 or later. Anand use VS Community 2015.3. IIRC, by default it doesn't have LTCG enabled.

By default, release builds are almost entirely statically linked (with a few shared libraries, platform dependent), which makes linking time pretty significant. As a result, it ends up more as a linking benchmark than a compilation benchmark.

[compilerdev]

Ian Cutress replied on the article comments that LTCG is indeed used. With LTCG those strange results make sense - it's spending a lot of time on just 4 threads by default - actually majority of the time is on one thread for the Chromium case, it hits some current limitations of the VC++ compiler regarding CPU/memory usage that makes scaling worse for Chromium (but not for smaller programs or with non-LTCG builds). Increasing the number of threads from the default of 4 is possible, but will not help here. The frontend (parsing) work is well parallelized by Ninja, it's probably the reason why the Threadrippers do end up ahead of the faster single-core Intel CPUs.