Best CPUs for Workstations: 2017

"Some workstation users will need ECC memory, and up to 512GB of it. When memory has an error rate of 1 error per GB per year, using 512GB ensures almost two bit errors per day: something that a 60-day simulation would find catastrophic."

OT:<p>I am in the market for an upgrade to my home PC. I use it for Compiling and Gaming.<p>I am finding the sheer variety of CPU&#x27;s and their weird naming conventions utterly confusing. Then combine that with the almost-as-confusing choice of motherboards and the bit-better-but-not-much choice of RAM and I am completely lost.<p>Any tips out there for finding a path through this maze, how do I upgrade my PC without requiring an advanced degree in Intel&#x2F;AMD marketing speak?<p><i>EDIT: Added use of PC.</i>

Remember that one-bit errors aren&#x27;t necessarily small errors. A single one bit change when working with 64 bit floating point can result in a very large difference in value.<p>0b0111111111101111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111 == 1.7976931348623157e+308<p>0b0011111111101111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111 == 0.9999999999999999

Why does the image on this article show rackmount equipment while talking about workstations? I find their selections to be, at least for my work, much more server-oriented than workstation.<p>Do a lot of people really run &gt;512GB RAM in their workstations rather than running a &quot;thin&quot; workstation and running simulations on servers or EC2?<p>I just built a new workstation a couple months ago: i7 7700 (not the K), 64GB RAM, one of those closed loop CPU water coolers... As a workstation, I wanted it quiet, and performance has been great. Long running jobs I run on our dev&#x2F;stg cluster (4 machines, 512GB total RAM, 48 total cores.

A discussion when Ryzen was released had quite a bit of info on PC builds:<p>Ryzen is for Programmers | <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=14243350" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=14243350</a> (May 2017, 272 comments)

Well it&#x27;s nice to finally have serious competition in x86 CPU market.

I wonder how the EPYC 7401P would compare with the 1950X in terms of performance&#x2F;price? It has 24 cores v. 16, but with a lower clock speed, and is $51 more. If you can actually use all the cores, I suspect better?

The new AMD CPUs look otherwise good, but it seems they still don&#x27;t run rr. Giving up rr is not a reasonable option if the purpose of the workstation is developing software in the kind of language that gdb can make sense of (C, C++, Rust).

A workstation will be used or at least turned on 24&#x2F;7. The one I just sat down at sure is. So when calculating costs one should include daily power consumption (power used + cooling needs). Some of these new intel chips run very hot.

Doesn&#x27;t Coffee Lake release today? I&#x27;m upgrading for sure.

If money were no object, Xeon Platinum 8180m ($13k retail).

Somewhat off topic, but what about open hardware platforms that are really friendly to hacking around on the hardware?<p>Is this just a thing of dreams?

Somewhat off-topic, but I need to replace my ancient workstation and would love a recommendation. I prefer to max cores and do not care much for clock speeds (I work mostly on algorithm development and can parallelize experiments relatively easily but often run multiple unrelated tests). 10-15k budget.<p>I was thinking of dual-CPU Z840; are there better options?

Just in time for Intel to release the 6c&#x2F;12t Coffee Lake i7, and make all of these comparisons (slightly) out of date.

I was one step from getting a threadripper... But then I opted for a 1800x, I will invest more on the gpu side when there will be the hw to properly drive a 4&#x2F;8k vr headset eh:) I wonder though if there&#x27;s a way to restore disabled cores on a Epyc chip... As according to and Amd they all born with 32 cores...

Hasn&#x27;t cloud computing reached the point where local workstations like this aren&#x27;t required?

$999 for the best choice seems really high to me. I understand that they&#x27;re trying to generalize a broad range of applications, but still.<p>They mention the Ryzen 5 is better bang for the buck, but dismiss it for having &quot;low overall performance.&quot; I guess I&#x27;m wrong in thinking that, for 98% of people, a $250 CPU would still be wasteful.

Since this article is about &quot;workstations&quot;, it should have only considered ECC-enabled systems. Since it didn&#x27;t (hardly mentioned ECC in fact) it&#x27;s a useless article IMHO.

anandtech.com used to be an okay source, but it is getting worse pretty quick, non-sense article like this is helping anantech to get that position fast. threadripper 1950x is not the overall best workstation processor, it is more like a toy for kids into gaming&#x2F;overclocking.<p>1950x is slow for multithreaded applications, it has a low cinebench score of ~3,000, you pay some serious $ for a fancy motherboard full of LED lights, then you don&#x27;t have officially verified ECC support.<p>As a comparison, you get the same mutithreaded speed, much cheaper system cost if you just buy second hand dual 2696v2 processors with real ECC support. if you need real processing power in a single box and have a tight budget, there is a flood of E5-2696v4 processors on the market at $950-1,100 each. for a much nicer budget, you can always go dual&#x2F;quad Intel 8180.