CPU for Lazarus & FPC

[kapibara]

Does Lazarus or FPC benefit from more cpu cores?

I'm looking at the 3.2 ghz Intel G3258 Anniversary version.

An Intel i7 with more cores is considerably more expensive and I dont know if it is worth it.. I only do Lazarus programming on this computer.

[SymbolicFrank]

The IDE only if you work with huge projects.

To have your own programs use them, you have to use TThread, or start multiple processes.

[JuhaManninen]

An Intel i7 with more cores is considerably more expensive and I dont know if it is worth it.. I only do Lazarus programming on this computer.

IMO Intel i7 is not worth it. Save your money for something useful.
Computers have been fast enough for some time already for "normal" tasks. Lazarus is light compared to some other IDEs, FPC is fast compared to C++. They don't need super-computers. For example I have a passively cooled ASRock BeeBox TV-box as my main development machine. It is fast enough for anything I do. A clean build of Lazarus takes 4 minutes but I don't need a clean build often.
Recommended!

BTW, Lazarus IDE can compile dependent packages in parallel, thus multiple cores speed up things somewhat.
In general the plentiful cores are overrated because most applications most of times use just one.

[tsr]

Two cores is enough in most cases with Lazarus.

In my 4 core machine I used 3 cores x 95% in some extreme case (two compilation at once and some application running).

SSD disk will give you more boost than additional cores 

[Graeme]

In general the plentiful cores are overrated because most applications most of times use just one.

It's not always only about compiling or Lazarus IDE. If you run many applications together (like I do), I think multiple cores help out a lot. On average I have about 15 programs running while I develop software. Then I often run 1 or 2 VM's in the background to test on too. And these are just the applications I started, and that excludes the OS itself, any other services it runs and your desktop environment.

Also try and max out your memory - whatever your motherboard supports. Applications these days are memory pigs (unlike 15+ years ago). eg: Firefox here takes up about 1.5GB of RAM, Mozilla Thunderbird another 500-600MB, Lazarus IDE another 150-200MB. And these are just 3 of my 15+ applications I run together. Then if you run a full desktop environment (I don't) like KDE Plasma, that eats up another 1-2GB of RAM. Remember, if you system starts swapping memory to disk, everything comes to a crawl.

If there is one thing I hate, it's a slow development system (and small screens). Get the highest specs you can afford, and remember both CPU and RAM go hand in hand.

[marcov]

(if you buy a new system, it will probably be DDR4, which is dirt cheap nowadays. 32GB is not extreme. If you don't max your memory make sure you have a mainboard with 4 dimm slots, with two filled. That will make upgrading later cheaper)

Note that a _build_ of the fpc project is partially multithreaded, so for FPC development (not development with FPC) multi core has some uses, but again only if you already have SSD:

- the build of the packages, utils and ide/ are FPC threaded. Though one->two is a bigger change then two->four
- the testsuite is threaded (mostly for compiler devs)
- the CHM building is multithreaded and parallelizes quite well.

On my i7-3770 I can get build times close to 1minute for FPC on Linux. Windows is slightly slower. (but also has some really big units extra)

I have i7's but that is mainly because I tend to buy old models when the new comes out (I bought both an ivy bridge desktop and laptop when haswell came to market, the haswells were 5% faster, but the ivy bridges were half the price). 

Strangely enough, the webshops that are not known for their cheap prices (the ones where your mom and dad would buy) often have the best deals on old models in a discount part of the website. I was planning to build my own, but ultimately bought a complete system.

Anyway, make absolutely sure that you have a SSD and at least 8 GB memory, but that should be easy if not laptop. And even then, a larger SSD is usually worth more than spending on CPU as long as some basis requirements are met (no Atoms, make sure it can reach 3GHz with turboboost). It depends though on what other things you do with it.

[kapibara]

The new system is up and running with Lazarus installed:

Intel G3258 Anniversary @ 3.2 GHZ, socket 1150
16GB (2x8) low latency DDR3 sticks
Samsung EVO 850 SSD, 250GB
Asus Z97-A motherboard
Intel HD Graphics
27" Samsung led monitor

Compared to my old Wolfdale Intel E5300 @ 2.6 GHZ (6GB DDR2 and mechanical drives) the new box flies.

Its possible to clock the anniversary cpu at something like 3.3-4GHZ without much or any extra heat, but will probably skip that because at 3.2 everything already feels fast enough. The stock cooler that everyone is complaining on is not bad at all, it just needs some more silverpaste to make contact with the cpu.

Chassie is Antec GX500.

[ausdigi]

I think if you reinstalled Windows afresh on your old system you'd be surprised how fast it is again (not sure if Linux/Debian suffers the same entropy).

[kapibara]

You are right, the old computer was fine for Lazarus development and daily work. If not for some elusive hardware failure that made it unstable, I would not have upgraded. But on the other hand, the new systems extra speed affects my coding in a positive way.

I think if you reinstalled Windows afresh on your old system you'd be surprised how fast it is again (not sure if Linux/Debian suffers the same entropy).