[tupolef]

Did you experience a big gap between an older CPU and the current one?

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.

[rwaksmunski]

I went from 2013 MBP to M3 Pro MBP and the performance improvement in Rust / rust-analyzer was staggering.

[AdrianB1]

There is a huge difference between my laptop and my desktop in using VS Code with a few basic plugins. The difference of the hardware between the 2 machines is mostly CPU and SSD performance, the SSD makes a big impact opening projects with many small files, but the CPU is used for IntelliSense or even when you copy/paste a few thousands of LOC from one file to another (laptop fan gets to max for tens of seconds).

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.

[doublepg23]

I’d be curious if your old cpu uses an NVMe or SATA drive. I’ve seen a 20% increase on big projects from NVMe alone - I suspect due to the big I/O queue depths of NVMe.

[the8472]

Modern CPUs also have more cores. Make and Cargo can keep a threadripper fed for a few minutes with a task that would run an hour on a laptop.

[dist-epoch]

A new CPU would probably have double the core count (16c/32t) of your current CPU. C++ compilation can use all the cores.