I’m wondering which would be faster at compiling for a single line change to a single class: more cores at a lower clock speed (e.g. 10 core @ 3.3GHz) or less cores at a higher clock speed (e.g. 4 core at 4.2GHz).
You always want more cores when compiling code. If you are working on content only, then faster cores make more sene.
Compiling and linking can be very multi-core friendly, depending on the build toolchain.
Although the “compiling for a single line change to a single class” minimizes the work and the benefit from multi-core.
In a large code base like UE4, changing a single line still requires linking multiple files so there may be some benefit.
Linking is still single threaded, so I’d avoid going too low on clock speed.
Not sure how useful this is, but I have found that my current 8-core i7-4790K (4.0Ghz) drastically out performed a 12-Core Xeon (2.8Ghz I think) - in almost every way.