Every February I buy a new machine that is top of the line, mostly to reduce build times. I also compare it to my previous machines and see where I am at and how big my gains actually are.

I was replacing a 2nd gen i7 (affectionately named MasslessC) with an AMD-FX 8350, which ought to be faster so I named it Tachyon. Both have a raid-1 of high performance SSDs (Linux Software RAID, bonnie++ had the throughput on both at more than 1.2GB/s), both maxed out the motherboard RAM (32gb in the intel and 64gb in the bulldozer with better timings on the RAM) and my 4.5 MLOC codebase took about 3 minutes and 50 seconds to build and Tachyon with her 8350 did it in 3:30. That was not acceptable gains....

I started by overclocking Tachyon and her 8350. But I could only add 200mhz even after exceeding what the community considered safe voltage bumps. until I learned about spread spectrum clocking. I disabled that and fixed all the cores at the same speed and I got it stable at 4.5ghz, 500mhz more than the "cap". 3:15 or so. Also my definition of stable is an hour in prime 95 not crashing, not exceeding 60c and then succeeding on all my benchmark tests.

Well I decided I needed to do better than that, so I learned about CPU lapping. I got some static safe foam and mounted my the 8350 to it, and I got a small glass pane and mounted 1200 grit sandpaper to it. I did 50 strokes in each of the 4 directions to pull off the Nickel. With the rough copper exposed underneath I replaced the sandpaper with 1500 grit and did another 200 passes, then 2000 and 3000 grit each with 200 passes of 50 in the 4 directions. The top of that CPU was a copper mirror the likes of which Archimedes could use to set ablaze a thousand invading ships. I remounted it and managed to get to 4.6ghz with another voltage bump. This is because voltage bumps exponentially raise the temperature with respect clock speed. The extra cooling allow by removing the nickel allowed that heat to be wicked away just a little faster.

Then I dropped $400 on a water cooling setup and got temperatures to not exceed 29c after 60 minutes of prime95. This was insane the largest pump, and extra 2 pints in the reservoir, careful calculations of the mineral content of the water so that as it aged silver was deposited inside my copper parts, simultaneously sterilizing the fluid. Every thing that touched the water was surgical grade polypropylene, 100% pure copper or the antimicrobial silver I added specifically in such a way that it would slowly be electrolyzed away. The water has been changed only once nothing has ever grown and it is an odd milky white that conducts heat marvelously (better than antifreeze in your car, unless you own a Lamborghini). Tachyon is now a marvel of liquid flow control with hoses and radiators showing that my aesthetic skills are lacking.

This was the limit of Tachyon's CPU. Any further clock or voltage increase by the tiniest margins prevented a stable bootup of even a minimalistic custom kernel. My build times were down to 3:00 minutes plus or minus 2 seconds. I was satisfied, this $1,900 was worth the time of enjoyment I spent building it and the reduced build times. Fun, practical and the machine is stable to this day.

This took me all the way to the following February and time to buy another machine. I decided to get a slim laptop with lower performance for the sake of mobility. So I bought a System 76 gazelle (or whatever African wildlife) pro, their i7 ultrabook. It was attempting to compete with the Macbook Air. It was less than 1.8cm thick and came with a mobile 4th gen i7 clocked a 1.6Ghz. It could clock itself all 4 up to 2.5Ghz or one core up to 4Ghz, and tends to idle around 600mhz. I bought 16Gb of ram and a mismatched pair of a Sata3 and M1 SSD on Newegg and raided them.

Before deciding its name I benched it for shits and giggles. It built my codebase in 2:30, beating Tachyon and it's Bulldozer by 30 whole seconds, and with all the new changes to the codebase the 2nd gen i7, MasslessC, was up to 4 whole minutes. It beat my desktop soundly in every other test I threw at it save for GPU benchmarks and disk IO. Though it was within a few percent there. So the machine was dubbed Inflation (referring to the initial expansion of the Universe that occurred at many times the speed of light and any named tachyon I was aware of) cost about $1,400 grand total only the first $1,000 affecting the performance of builds.

This year I bought their 6th gen i7 with desktop replacement. SleeperService is similarly maxed out the RAM and 4 disks of SSD nonsense. SleeperService's build times are well below 2 minutes, above 3 minutes on Inflation and nearly 4 minutes on Tachyon because of changes to use more templates and other costly compile time stuff.

Intel is winning by leaps and bounds in every test and game I throw at it (there were many but this is already too long). I did everything I could to make Tachyon's Bulldozer fast but a slim and comparatively cheap notebook beat it on its first boot.

I dub you a biased AMD fanboy by virtue of my comprehensive experimentation.