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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.

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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 28, @04:09PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 28, @04:09PM (#1308676)

    The lessons will be learned. Too bad it happens so slowly.

    One of the lessons learnt could be sometimes it's hard to out-compete companies which have "investors" willing to put up with billions of dolllars of losses every quarter till they get it right and/or their competition has gone out of business.

    These investors often are perfectly fine with it since they flip their shares for higher to other investors hoping to do the same thing. Like a legalized Ponzi scheme.

    It's just like the taxi companies in my country - they had no chance of outcompeting Uber etc who had piles of cash to burn through. And everyone and their dog were saying the cab companies should learn to compete - get better, cheaper etc. But years later, there are far fewer taxis and their "competitive" replacements are now much more expensive.