Productivity CPU

[YoungBlade]

18 hours ago, testcy said:

Does this mean that now besides cores I should also consider X3D?

X3D CPUs primarily benefit gaming performance. There are some other workloads that do benefit, but they are the exception, not the rule. And in general, those same workloads benefit more from core count than from extra cache. The comparisons shown there are between CPUs of the same core count, but not the same price point. If you instead compared the 9900X and 9800X3D, you'd see the 9900X almost always winning in productivity workloads.

[starsmine]

19 hours ago, testcy said:

 

 

 

 

 

 

Does this mean that now besides cores I should also consider X3D?

ehhh. 
If you know what your workload actually is, and you have done the math. sure but given how vague you are, I'm going to go with no. 

Productivity means alot of things. From Wave propagation simulations, to cad, to premier pro, to compiling ram formations in a pdk. 

you have a chicken egg problem with software and high cache. Cache/memory bandwidth is actually the biggest bottleneck in CPU architecture... kinda. A lot of optimized software is not expecting l3 cache to be that big so it isnt taking advantage of it and does tricks to do other things rather then wait on memory. 

If you are unsure if you need it, you are better off in 85% of cases to just get more cores as n-threading applications is usually more focused on by developers. (which is why core ultra is often a decent choice if its n-threaded and not using AVX).

At some point its also not worth spending more time thinking about this as if its actually for productivity, the hours you spend thinking about this are hours you could have spent working on your project. Like the ram compiling thing I had a run time of over a month straight on an i9 raptor lake, if I spent a week to find a cpu that can do it in a week quicker time. I didnt actually save any time as this was a one time pass. 

If you have no plans to upgrade CPUs inside 5 years, 6 of one, half a dozen of the other. There are no wrong choices here. 

 

if your productivity requires real time feed back and is computationally heavy then see if there are benchmarks out there for that suite of applications. 

[KidKid]

On 8/7/2025 at 11:24 AM, testcy said:

In separate topics I was advised to get Ryzen 9 7900 (instead of 7900X) and Intel Core Ultra 7 265K for productivity. If there is no much price difference (using the 7900 stock cooler and buying a basic air cooler for 265K) what would you get? AM5 seems more future proof, but I don't plan to change the CPU for several years anyway. 

AMD does make better CPUs these days for most tasks. However the Intel Core Ultra 7 has E and P cores (total is more than the AMD CPU) so for multitasking that may be better.