AMD Ryzen 9 3950X

> How beefy is that machine to achieve 2m20? Ryzen 9 3950X (16 core). I think it was top of the line 5 or 6 years ago but it only cost me about £300 second hand for the whole PC (with 128 GB RAM - before the RAMpocalypse!) Definitely not a crazy machine. > I started using C++ on MS-DOS, on a 20 MHz 386SX PC with 2MB RAM and 20 MB HDD Yeah, I mean early C++ was quite a lot simpler than modern C++23! Of course it's going to compile way faster. You're not compiling UE 5 on that machine! Compilers didn't have so many slow optimisations back then either.

Yeah.. late 90's to early 00's was pretty peak builder era. I learned through a relative fluke how much going a bit over the top on memory and faster drives really helped over even a faster CPU/GPU a lot of the time for general use. My current computer is literally the first I've built in decades that I didn't max out the RAM... I mean, I kind of did as 2x48gb was the most I could get in DDR5@6000 and only use 2 slots (or it would run much slower). 4th gen Core series was the longest I'd held onto a single PC (close to 5 years total for a 4790K). I did a mid-cycle gpu and nvme upgrade and that was it. I bumped to a 3950X/5950X and now 9950X since... AM3 is really the first socket in a long time I'd done an in-place upgrade for any CPU. My daughter's Ryzen 2400 to a 5000 series, and my own build from a 3600 -> 3950X -> 5950X... the 3600 was a placeholder as I couldn't get a 3950X for a few months. I couldn't even name half the CPUs I ran from 1998 to 2005 or so... it was such a blur of upgrades every 6-12 months... I'd upgrade my computer, my wife's, my son's... etc. Then, things just completely stagnated... I mean there's been progress, but it's over the course of years, not seeing 2-3x in under a year.

The article links to a list of "The five greatest AMD CPUs". I've owned two and a half of these! Athlon XP 1800+, Ryzen 7 1700 (I had the 1800X which was just a higher bin of the same chip), and Ryzen 9 3950X. That same article also says that extending x86 to 64 bits "wasn't hard", which I'm not so sure about. There are plenty of mistakes AMD could have made and cleanups they could have missed, but they handled it all quite well AFAICS.

I went from a Sandy Bridge (i5 2500k) to a Ryzen 9 3950x, and the perceived performance improvement was insane. You also have to take into account RAM and PCIe generation bumps, NVMe, etc.

I really have no choice but to install Linux now. The nag screens in Windows 10 are already getting unbearable. The over 5 year old system is still running games at high detail just fine (3950x CPU, 2080 GPU, 32Gb ram running at 2k resolution). TPM 2.0 was finalized in Nov 2019 after the above system was built. Hardware isn't progressing that quickly anymore which makes a hardware requirement like TPM 2.0 very arbitrary honestly. Microsoft could have easily made Windows 11 work without TPM 2.0 as the workarounds attest to. It could have been "if you don't have this, you don't get some security features but otherwise it's fine". My conspiracy sense is tingling at the hard requirement for TPM 2.0 that really doesn't need to be there. A bit like when MS bought Skype and moved it from peer to peer voice to a central server based system with no monetary gain from doing that, someone obviously decided that needed to be done. We don't need to be asking people to throw away perfectly performant hardware to upgrade. There's actually nothing in Windows 11 enabled by the requirement since Windows 10 also supported TPM 2.0 already, it just didn't require it. I've also never been subject to the attacks TPM 2.0 protects against. There may be cases where TPM 2.0 is wanted, i can imagine it's useful for servers, but i really don't need it.

10% per year does add up, particularly if you don’t upgrade every year. I think if you get some decent lifetime out of your computer you have a good chance of still getting a significant speed boost when you upgrade. I have a Ryzen 3950X and I suspect even now there’s a noticeable speed improvement at the top end, and I don’t feel like upgrading yet. That was still a big improvement over the Intel 3930K (?) I had before, even though sandy bridge was when progression started to show a slowdown. I do think it’s perhaps easier to buy a computer with some weird bottleneck (crappy storage and the like) which will present day-to-day performance on par with your outgoing computer. Day-to-day high performance is seemingly hard to get right even if you can crunch numbers faster. Sort of a latency vs throughput problem.

Unless you buy some obsolete Epyc CPU with a small number of cores, which would be slower than even one up-to-date Ryzen 9 9950X (which can beat even 32-core older Epycs in compute-limited tasks that use vector instructions), 4 Ryzen boxes with 16 cores & 64 GB ECC memory each should be significantly cheaper (probably not exceeding $6000) and also faster than one box with an Epyc CPU and 256 GB, where the CPU alone could be more expensive than the complete Ryzen systems, if bought at retail prices. I actually happen to have in my home a cluster of five eATX cases, which stay on two adjacent IKEA metallic tables and which are connected in a ring of direct 10 Gb/s Ethernet links (i.e. they all have dual-port NICs). Therefore it is not really impractical, even if such a configuration may be infrequent. In the distant past, I was using dual-socket Xeon or Opteron motherboards in those cases, because such MBs and CPUs were much cheaper than today. Then, by the time of Zen 1, when the Epyc CPUs were still very cheap, the upgrades have been to single-socket Epyc MBs. More recently, Epyc became much more expensive and Ryzen CPUs have much better performance per dollar, so the latest upgrades have been to Ryzen MBs. I look forward to the launch of Ryzen 9 9950X, which should double the throughput of the vector operations, 5 years after Ryzen 9 3950X (Zen 2) has done the same in 2019. As my PC, I use an Intel NUC. Whenever I need to execute something for which that would be too weak, I…