Conversation

Patricia Aas

@pati_gallardo

Feb 28, 2021

What is the sweet spot for RAM per core? Is it around 4GB?

Replying to

Depends a lot on what you're doing. Based on the assumption that it's related to suffering through Chromium builds, there's a baseline amount of memory required and then a lower amount for each added job. It helps a bit to have a ton of memory beyond that for caching though.

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amd.com/en/products/cp (32 core / 64 thread) is what I was planning on using for my new workstation build along with at least 128GB of memory. I had trouble sourcing the parts for the overall build (particularly motherboard) in Canada and it got substantially delayed though...

amd.com

AMD Ryzen™ Threadripper™ 3970X Processor

Replying to

Which hits the 4GB per core

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Yeah, but I wouldn't double the amount of memory if I was doing a build based on amd.com/en/products/cp (64 core / 128 thread). Most of the jobs won't even come close to 1GB. It's more like you want ~32GB baseline, ~64GB+ for cache (ideally) and then maybe 0.5GB per CPU thread.

amd.com

AMD Ryzen™ Threadripper™ 3990X Processor

Replying to

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Not much science involved in that estimate, just my feeling on it based on doing a huge amount of Chromium and AOSP builds on different hardware. I don't really expect that the cache helps as much as I hope since NVMe SSDs are so fast. It's largely just about the number of cores.

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Think about how much time you waste waiting for builds, think about the value of your time and strongly consider getting a really nice Threadripper CPU. That's my feeling on it. I wish I could have put a new workstation together last year or earlier. AFAICT COVID screwed it up.

4:16 PM · Feb 28, 2021Twitter Web App

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Couldn't find anywhere to get the latest revision motherboards and didn't really want to get an older revision for the latest generation CPUs. Especially if I decided to go with the 64 core / 128 thread variant since the typical motherboards won't have good enough power supply.

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Another major annoyance with the Threadripper CPUs is that they really need special CPU coolers designed for them. noctua.at/en/nh-u14s-tr4 seems like the best bet based on reviews testing. However, it's only adequate for 3970X. It isn't really good enough for the 3990X.

noctua.at

NH-U14S TR4-SP3

Continuing the legacy of Noctua’s classic NH-U-series, which has received more than a thousand awards and recommendations from international hardware websites and magazines, the NH-U14S has become a...