Hey guys, I wanna hear about your opinion on a top...

# random

[gabrielfv]

Hey guys, I wanna hear about your opinion on a topic:

I want to build myself a HEDT for (mostly) Android Development which I'll eventually also be using for building other stacks with their daemons and services (running a development postgres instance, development server, small minikube development cluster for test reasons), as well as the tooling for front and backend development. But the focus is 80-90% android development.

Do you guys think an AMD Threadripper 3960X/3970X is too overkill for that matter? I was wondering if gradle could take advantage of the ludicrous extra core count. (24/32 cores over the non-threadripper tops of 16 cores), but idk if it would be a reasonable difference taking price into account. It is possible that most of the time gradle won't be using that many cores anyway.

I intend to throw linux at it. Do any of you who own a HEDT Workstation tried to see the difference between Windows/Linux performances?

[tmg]

At my company we use high-end thinkpad, so, not even close to threadripper, but the difference in performance from windows to Linux is enormous! specially for android development.
So, if your parts have good linux drivers go with linux.

[gabrielfv]

I'm aware there's a big hit in both system daemons weight and file system that both favor linux, which is why I want to go with it in the first place, but was wondering how big it was given I never tried to run android development on windows. Good to know it really is as big as I anticipated.

[tmg]

I did not do android development, I was doing just backend, but the android devs were the ones who gave more praise! I think what they said was the biggest win was the emulator performance

[rnentjes]

With the project at my job linux is 4-5 times faster than windows with exactly the same hardware, but this project is build with maven.

[napperley]

Often with software development the software compilation speed is the biggest bottleneck (especially with statically typed programming languages like Kotlin). Many software development areas have the same bottleneck. Having a faster CPU makes an enormous difference to software compilation.

[napperley]

"
I'm aware there's a big hit in both system daemons weight and file system that both favor linux, which is why I want to go with it in the first place
"
These are also some of the major factors that people cite as to why they use Linux for 3D modelling (desktop Linux is significantly used in that area). One person did a video benchmarking 3D modelling performance using Linux and Windows via Blender:

https://youtu.be/cpE2B2QSsa0▾

[trevjones]

cpu clock is going to be biggest thing. next is core count which gradle will only make use of if the project is able to parallelize. lots of modules -> lots of speed ups possible with high core count.

for me if it is the diff of a few mhz core clock and a few cores i'll take the clock speed since it will have the bigger impact on the bottlenecks, which at some point you end up at in any build.

[trevjones]

i run a 9900k hackintosh, compared to a macbook pro, it is not even in the same realm for all day workloads

[gabrielfv]

We must factor IPC into the single-core performance. Most projects will be parallelizing tasks since a single module has a few independent tasks running. I wonder what the performance difference is between an R9 3950X and a TR 3970X that doubles the core count.

[gabrielfv]

And definitely would love to watch gradle outputting 128 lines of concurrently running tasks on a 3990X and its stupid 64 core count, but I'm not paying that premium any time soon

[kenkyee]

I'd guess it depends on how many Gradle modules your project has.
Someone at my company bought one for Linux kernel Dev....it builds crazy fast. Make parallizes well....

[napperley]

With Kotlin development as an example CPU multi core performance can have a huge impact on software compilation performance (with Kotlin JVM, JS, and Android development platforms; Kotlin Native is currently the exception although that should change sometime this year).