Both measures have their place. In clusters e.g. rendering farms, then perf/dollar or even perf/watt are paramount. But in a single desktop for a performance-hungry engineer then absolute performance is the number that counts.

Only if he doesn't care at all about money.

> Only if he doesn't care at all about money.

Power is not always the only cost. I work in an industry where you pay per core for software license fees far in excess of the cost of power. There, perf/core is what matters.

Well, even if money does matter, the tradeoff is often more complex than just the one-time hardware cost. If you are a software engineer whose time is expensive, and a slower workstation processor means you wait an extra 5 seconds for a compilation 100 times a day, then the time costs add up quickly.

I would imagine the same is true for e.g. server response latency when that latency correlates to user experience and thus growth/popularity of your service. People might not notice a few ms, but 100ms vs 300ms is definitely visible.

Compiling can be more expensive than 5s/compile, but you should still probably lean toward things like ccache/ramdisks/distcc instead of the latest processor.

I think the real value is new things like TSX/HLE.

Yup, all those things are useful, but they don't solve everything. I've worked on projects where a single change to a header file would lead to a 20-minute rebuild adventure and where individual .cc files would take 10 minutes to compile. Caching and distcc build farms help somewhat but there's still, fundamentally, the critical path of a single file's (re)compilation, and only a faster CPU will help with that.

(And if you say "thin client, distcc, big build farm", then you just need the latest CPUs in the build farm instead.)

Of course this is as much an argument for a real module system in C/C++ as anything else...

(And, I completely agree that TSX and other architectural stuff is totally awesome, too. Perhaps that'll drive adoption more than incremental perf, but I'm just arguing perf is still often really important.)

When workplace is buying - ofcourse not. I have never ever seen a workstation for developers with AMD CPU here in Baltic countries.