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Journal by turgid

Cache or cores? Biscuit or cake?

It's about three years since I built my Ryzen system. It's a Ryzen 5 3600 (Zen 2, Socket AM4) with 32GB RAM.

Since dual core became a thing I have been meaning to take over the world with cunning multi-threaded code but about as far as I've got is some shell scripts that do things in parallel.

I figured I should upgrade the machine while AM4 CPUs are still available. I noted that AMD had some CPUs out with this newfangled 3D cache, and that they were pretty fast on certain workloads.

So my decision was biscuit or cake? Cache or cores?

It's taken me a few weeks, and much deliberation but today I decided to go for the cake. I think it will be more fun to have more cores to play with. I have ordered a Ryzen 9 5900X (12 core/24 thread Zen 3) and a cooler with two great big fans and fancy quiet bearings to go with it.

I'll need to revisit my old tests from three years ago and see what sort of a difference all those extra cores make. Obviously, there will be more contention for memory bandwidth. If I get around to it, I might post the results together with the results for the old CPU.

Meantime, I have been writing a little bit of C, finally getting around to something I've been meaning to do for 15 years. One day I'll write something about procrastination. I have an anecdote.

 

Reply to: Re:Cores and Java

    (Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday May 25, @05:34PM

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Thursday May 25, @05:34PM (#1308149)

    The drawback of course, is that Java programs start up slowly and then after a couple minutes seem to "warm up" and run fast. And they can run stably for a very long time.

    So don't use Java for, say, a replace for the 'ls' command.

    Do use Java for large complex programs where you want good performance and very long up time without interruption.

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