How old was your previous CPU? Different people have vastly different expectations when it comes to upgrading. I'm certain I can play all of the games that I'm interested in on my 3 year old Ryzen 7600x, and that I'm limited by the 5 year old GPU (which I dread upgrading because of the crunch). Would someone with a 5 year old CPU be well served by upgrading to a 9600x, absolutely. But some people think they have to upgrade their Threadripper every year.
(As far as work goes, I realize this directly contradicts the OP's point, which is the intent. If you know your workflow involves lots of compiling and local compute, absolutely buy a recent Threadripper. I find that most of the time the money spent on extra cores would be better spent on a more modest CPU with more RAM and a faster SSD. And more thoughtful developer tooling that doesn't force me to recompile the entire Rust work tree and its dependencies with every git pull.)
I think it was a Radeon 3600x, state of the art 6-7 years ago. Replaced with 9950x. I was surprised by how big of a difference the CPU update had on frame rates. (GPU: 4080)
I also do a lot of rust compiling (Which you hinted at), and molecular dynamics sims leveraging a mix of CUDA/GPU, and thread pools + SIMD.
Makes sense, yeah, a 3600x is far behind the curve now.
Edit: Took a look at AMD's lineup and realized they did something I got conditioned not to expect: they've maintained AM5 socket compatibility for 3 generations in a row. This makes me far more likely to upgrade the CPU!
https://www.amd.com/en/products/processors/chipsets/am5.html
> all AMD Socket AM5 motherboards are compatible with all AMD Socket AM5 processors
I love this. Intel was known to change the socket every year or two basically purely out of spite, or some awful marketing strategy. So many wasted motherboards.
Oh wow. Didn't save me though. I've never been able to drop a new CPU into a motherboard - it's always CPU + RAM + MB time due to the socket consideration you mention.
Even for compilation workloads, you need to benchmark beforehand. Threadrippers have lower boost clocks and (in the higher core count models) lower base frequencies than the high end Ryzen desktop CPUs. Most build systems are not optimized for such high core counts.