Hello,
I will be building a new machine shortly. When working with larger scripts, do we have an understanding if rhino/grasshopper prefers high cache or a bit faster clock speed? I’m looking at the AMD X3D CPUs vs X, 5800X vs 5800X3D or 7950X vs 7950X3D (when released) or possibly intel 13900k.
You will never notice the difference.
are you sure?
When I animate a slider to generate jpegs, it takes an hour and a half for 3500 frames.
No one is going to be able to tell you which will be faster, no one has ever done such benchmarking and if they have you have no reason to believe it–benchmarking is hard–or think you’d ever actually notice. I bet you’d be hard pressed to tell the difference between an identical platform with the best vs worst possible CPU, unless you can exploit additional cores. The main difference I noticed in my last 2 “new” computer setups was a reduction in fan noise.
Sorry if I sound whatever but what your code IS is going to be more important than your hardware, there’s no way for anyone to tell you if “animating a slider” is faster with more cache or not, or if the CPU is even the bottleneck in that.
Thanks for your input. I do appreciate it and it keeps my thinking in check.
I refactored my script and it takes about a third of the time to complete, significant reduction and jives with your comments.
My hardware is very old (13 year old i7 870 CPU) so it’s been quite a while since I’ve built a new machine or familiarized myself with PC hardware.
AMD has these new CPUs where they are stacking ~3 times the L3 cache at the cost of a small reduction in frequency.
The gaming industry has all kinds of benchmarks where there are some pretty significant gains for some games and not for others.
I wanted to see how an application like grasshopper might fit into that spectrum.
What I’m hearing is that type of benchmark is not available, and if it were, any differences would most likely be minor.
Anything recent will be much faster than a 13-year old lower-end CPU.
Things that will impact speed:
- CPU speed
- RAM size and speed
- Bus speeds
- Storage speed (compare SSD to old HDD. Especially NVMe is going to be MANY times faster than old HDDs).
Now, CPU speeds haven’t increased dramatically, but even with “just” an AMD Ryzen 9 7900x you’ll get 12 cores (24 threads essentially), and it has a pretty good cache. I think the more important updates have been on the front of storage and memory.
Faster memory means the CPU can access more data in shorter time. If you have enough memory you’ll find that the operating system won’t have to swap out memory to disk and back. Already this will make your machine much more responsive. If you’re doing data intensive work then I’d target 64GB RAM or more, but that is also going to be a bit more expensive. In many cases these days 32GB is probably already enough. But make sure you get speed (and that of course requires a motherboard that supports high speed memory).
Regarding storage, if you have a motherboard that has M.2 slots on it then you could do NVMe storage. 1TB costs in my area around 65-70€, but you get speeds of 3200/2100 MB/s (3.2 GB read, 2.1GB write). Regular HDDs typically give speeds 190-250MB/s for throughput. Just already saving files will give about 10 times speed up if you think about it.
I hope that gives some ideas to think about when upgrading your hardware.