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Compilation is CPU bound and, depending on what language mostly single core per compilation unit (I.e. in LLVM that's roughly per file, but incremental compilations will probably only touch a file or two at a time, so the highest benefit will be from higher single core clock speed, not higher core count). So you want to focus on higher clock speed CPUs.
Also, high speed disks (NVME or at least a regular SSD) gives you performance gains for larger codebases.
On linux you can also use vmtouch to force cache the project files in RAM. This would speed up the first compilation of the day. On repeated compilations files that are read from disk would naturally be in the RAM cache already and it would not matter what drive you have.
I have used this in the past when I had slow drives. I was forcing all necessary system libs (my IDE, jdk etc.) and my project files into RAM at the start of the day, before going on a 2min break to make coffee while it read all that stuff from a hdd. Which sped up the workflow in general, at least at the start of the day.
It is not the same as a ramdisk, as the normal linux file cache writes back changes to the disk in the background.
You can also pin your fastest core to a specific process, so that it gets no tasks except for the one you want it to do. But that seems more hassle than it's worth, so I never tried that.
Monitor it's current resources, but disk I/O usually is a thing to look at. Don't use spinning disks
Don’t use spinning disks
Lets be honest here, that applies to any modern PC outside of mass media storage/backups. I've been saying for nearly 10 years now that HDDs don't belong in normal computers.
I'm going NVME
