Does better hardware speed up compilation?

2008-10-10 00:52

Yes! Old hardware:

Intel Pentium 4, 1.6GHz, 512KB Cache, 1GB RAM

New hardware:

Intel Core 2 Duo, 3.0GHz, 6MB Cache, 4GB RAM

The compile times for GCC 4.3.1:

$ genlop -t gcc
* sys-devel/gcc
[..]
Fri Sep 12 03:07:40 2008 >>> sys-devel/gcc-4.3.1-r1
merge time: 2 hours, 33 minutes and 15 seconds.

Fri Oct 10 01:02:54 2008 >>> sys-devel/gcc-4.3.1-r1
merge time: 37 minutes and 53 seconds.