[kgadek]

Depends on what are you doing. For any programmer working on a bigger project, where compilation time is greater than 2s, (let's say) 4x more power is superb.

If your code compiles in ~16 seconds, reducing that to 4 would add comfort.

If your code compiles 60 seconds, reducing that to 15 would allow not losing concentration.

If your code compiles in 60 minutes, reducing that to 15 minutes would actually allow to do any work on that (not that it's not possible, but it's really not pleasant).

[Erwin]

That's assuming it's sufficiently parallizable. If you only have a single thread, an ordinary Intel desktop CPU is still faster than any Xeon: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html

I thought about 4-core vs newer 8-core desktop CPUs when upgrading, but decided that I more often do work on less than 4 cores (with 1 you get the "Turbo" capacity). The only multi-threaded program is PyCharm which can use up all those cores when recalculating its static type checking of Python code (which it seems to do quite excessively).

[TheLoneWolfling]

And luckily, code compilation tends to be one of those things that can actually be effectively parallelized.

Another thing useful for a programmer is being able to benchmark things - with a multicore machine you can tie off one core (or multiple cores!) exclusively for a benchmark, which can really help reproducibility.

[rbanffy]

I don't compile much code, but having my full test suite run in 10 seconds instead of 10 minutes would do wonders for my productivity.