I tend to subscribe the the fastest possible single thread mantra as well and buy low core count, high frequency machines for desktop usage. OTOH, compiled code

I tend to subscribe the the fastest possible single thread mantra as well and buy low core count, high frequency machines for desktop usage. OTOH, compiled code software development is one of those areas where your better off with a few more cores vs higher frequency/newer machines. A very large number of opensource/automake/cmake/etc based projects have nearly perfect scaling out to at least a hundred threads. This is frequently true even for linker and packaging passes (given a parallel compressors like pigz). Between incremental linking, and runtime/loader linked systems (think linux kernel modules where each module is effectively a few C files linked into a .ko, each linked independently) this can even be true for the link phase as much of the overhead is IO/syscall bound even when cached. Either way, your still missing the point, these machines cost a couple hundred dollars, and they might be a few percent slower, and 3x the power budget, but where I live that power is going to work out to $20 a year. Its going to take 50 years to make up the price difference in power, and in 5 years i'm going to buy the same machine someone paid $4k for $400 and that person is going to have to spend another $4k to get something better.