Asking for advice:

If you wanted to buy a mid-range machine for a home lab, to be used primarily for benchmarking, which CPU would you pick?

~99% of users are on x86-64, but Intel or AMD? I was going with Intel in the past, but I'm afraid the big.LITTLE just adds unpredictable noise, making benchmarking harder. But I also heard the perf counters on AMD are not as precise, which is not great.

Opinions?

@tomasv Personally I will go for one that consumes less power... if it is for home lab. How inaccurate are AMD hw perf counters? Are they seriously flawed?

@hyeyoo I'm mostly referring to what Andres said about "perf c2c" in this talk:

https://youtu.be/dLrqQOCRFOU?t=1114

@tomasv
Define mid-range?

Also would it matter if it hits an edge hard? If everyone is using x86-64, that is terrible for overall knowledge of algorithms, because it might perform terribly on other hardware.

One of the reasons that benchmarks and profiling are mostly bin food, in fancy wishful packaging.

@lewiscowles1986 Good points. For me, mid-range is "beefy desktop", roughly. Let's say 8-16 physical cores / socket, 64GB+ RAM. Could be 2 sockets with more cores, etc. but nothing extreme. What matters to me is more the stability and "uniformity" of results than absolute numbers. I've been quite happy with i5-2500k until now, but it's it's getting small (just 4 cores) and too old (not necessarily the CPU, it's more the motherboard etc.).

I 100% agree there's value in benchmarking on other platforms, but that's what I use VMs for. Same thing applies to bigger machines - better to get them for a couple days, do testing and deprovision.

That being said, most of the benchmarking/profiling I do is rather universal, there's not that much platform-specific stuff. And when there is, a VM does the job just fine.

@tomasv I have an AMD CPU I bought in 2021 and am thinking of switching to intel when I upgrade because of the CPU performance counter disparity and because RR is much harder to use on AMD

@tomasv to be fair, it is not something that comes up every day, though, and when I bought my CPU ,at least, the 5950X was more affordable than an equivalent Intel CPU IIRC

@melanieplageman Even if it doesn't come up every day, does it make the limitation less serious? Because when it comes up, it'd likely be very useful to be able to to use RR easily. How many more hours have you spent debugging an issue because RR is difficult to use on AMD?

I mean, having a fire extinguisher that's hard to use is serious even if fires happen only very rarely ...

First world problem: I ended up just upgrading the CPU to the most powerful one available (for that socket), but now the UPS is beeping angrily that the machine draws too much power when under load 😥

@tomasv can't recommend about hardware, but large level of noise could be at least partialy mitigated in benchmarking by some statistical tricks like randomized testing.

@tomasv UPS: replace me! replace me! replace me!

I think UPS may be antiluddites...

@tomasv Buy a newer UPS. And then order a larger house connection. And because that's not available, buy a new house.

@ascherbaum Nah, I just removed the UPS, it's not really necessary.

I also had to bypass the circuit breaker and replace the fuse with a nail, and it seems to be working fi...#-#@";$;2(#!