Does Visual Studio 2012 utilize all available CPU cores?

Question

I am planning to build a new very fast developer computer under Visual Studio 2012 and Windows 7 64 bit. I am getting all fast components like SSD's and 16G RAM. I was wondering if Visual Studio 2012 is built to utilize all available CPU cores. I am trying to make a decision whether to get an expensive 6 core I7 CPU or a lesser expensive quad core CPU in terms of whether they make a difference in compile time since that's what takes the most time when I am not coding.

Note: There's a similar post from 2009 but I wanted to know if VS2012 has much better performance than VS 2010 in terms of cores utilization.

I am balking at the $1000+ price of the I7 Extreme.

Answer 1

I would recommend getting a non extreme latest generation i7 with a decent SSD and double the RAM. If you trace to the file system what visual studio is actually doing, you will see that it is reading and writing a great number of files. Much of these files are cached during the second build in a row, but an SSD and enough RAM seems to be the most important speed-up component in the equation and a quad core i5 or i7 is sufficient preferably with hyper-threading and VT technology in case you want to run 64 bit virtual machines later.

I have also noticed decent compilation performance upgrades from changing an old computer from IDE to AHCI in the bios following the proper guide.