[teambayleaf]

I second this. My experience with many core machines (32-64 cores) is kinda dissappointing so far.

Yes, running "make -j" on these machines feel amazing at first, but you will soon either 1) run out of memory, or 2) notice that you don't need so many cores anyway due to build dependencies.

[emn13]

Hmm, my experience has been resolutely great; we just upgraded to 64 thread 3970x's with 256GB of RAM, and pretty much everything worked smoothly out of the box; I'm very pleasantly surprised by the lack of tuning necessary.

We did do the math and decided that for us 4GB per thread is likely safe up front; 2GB per thread might have been pushing it. Another reason to avoid the 3990x (for us) was the tricky scaling of the previous generation's 2990WX; We don't have faith that all of our code would run well on the more memory-channel constrained machine.

I mean, if you're just running a single fairly small build, sure, it's likely overkill...