Kernel build performance

I don't know. For me, kernel build times stayed roughly constant (on those machines I upgraded), until I went multicore. Then they *plunged*. The first machine I ran Linux on in 1997 took half an hour to build a kernel, and that stayed true (it takes a bit over an hour for a 900MHz PIII nowadays). My current single-socket Nehalem desktop takes two minutes, and that's over NFS: do it on the NFS server and it takes 57 seconds. And that's *with* debugging information!

I think that could be considered a speedup. :)