That is insane. I'm surprised it can even go that low, I would have expected it to hit an IO bottleneck before then (large object files/linking/source reads, etc).
Even with a fast SSD on my lowly i7, I often wind up sitting at IO or lock contention instead of actual CPU bottlenecks (although it could be argued faster CPU = faster lock release = faster compilation).
I've done builds in /dev/shm/ on Xeon and Threadripper with only a trivial speed-up. If it can fit in tempfs, make/cc can just load it all into RAM anyway, so I guess you only reduce the build time by the time it takes for the first read. Which would explain why '-j' on a big codebase tends to trigger my OOM killer.
Technically, 100%. I'm full SSD right now though which has a seriously noticeable difference from from HDD but for what I do most days NVME isn't justifiable. I see others who can take advantage of the speeds and do so with huge returns.
I do have 2 super SFF HP boxes that only take NVME in the M.2 drive so have one on hand but it isn't installed at the moment.
That's just four SSDs mounted on one riser card with a fan. If you're going to count the aggregate bandwidth of an array, then the question's almost meaningless.
"Also, our compile test seems to have broken itself when we used Windows 10 1909, and due to travel we have not had time to debug why it is no longer working. We hope to get this test up and running in the new year, along with an updated test suite."
This is my frustration with almost all tech sites. The AMD press deck included compilation benchmarks, but the only others to reliably provide them are Phoronix.
Most reviewers don't bother doing compile benchmarks because they're not as familiar with them and perhaps they don't come in the same "canned" form as every other gaming benchmark. It may also be that each site caters to a particular audience.
On the other hand bench results have to be comparable and relevant (in time). Which is easy when you run the same still widely played GTA V year after year on every new CPU. But comparing compilation time for kernel version 3.11 (released at the same time as GTA V) seems a lot less relevant today.
Maybe this would change if someone would pre-package a build environment with source code, a nice gui and fancy abstract visualization of the compile process.
Phoronix does do this, but it's unfortunately harder to use than would be required for wide adoption in the press. It really has to be as simple as downloading an exe that pops up a window with a "go" button when run, and has to show some nice things happening on screen. Game and graphics benchmarks do this, so that's what they use.
