Off to the races: Distcc vs 5950x

[jesnow]

It's emerge -DNua world day today, as I still haven't switched to binary for any of my main machines.

Santa brought me an AMD 5950x, and so I get to watch my workstation with 32 local (ht) cores racing against my server (12yo core i7 860) plus about 70 distcc cores working for it including the workstation and three of my work machines.

It doesn't *mean* anything, as it's not a fair fight: They're different machines with different packages and different use flags, it's just fun to watch them race. The workstation usually lost before as it has chromium where the server (headless 99% of the time) has chrome and way fewer user packages. And workstation is losing again today, just a lot faster. Thank you kdenlive (no chromium today) for humbling the mighty 5950x.

The 5950x is noticeably faster than the 3600 it replaced but only just noticeably. It generally takes an overall 2x performance increase to be noticeable. It takes 5x to get into "Oh wow" territory, but I already couldn't justify the expense of the 5950x.

I switched to gentoo from suse linux in 2006, and I was running a single core at (iirc) 133Mhz. Now plenty of embedded processors can beat that performance. A Cray-1 would take weeks to do emerge -e world if it could do it. Soon we will have 500 3.6GHz cores in our wristwatches and toasters and think nothing of it.

Cheers,
Jon