Those mini machines are pretty decent now. The kind you can bolt right to the back of a monitor.
Absolutely! I got a little Ryzen 5 box with 64GB RAM and 1.5TB of SSD for, like, $500 ($300 base 16GB+500GB, IIRC?). Iβve been used to XPS laptops as my daily drivers for several years, my most recent being less than 2 y/o. It is absolutely shocking to me how much better that little Ryzen is, for how little money.
I havenβt checked power consumption on it, but at this point Iβm seriously considering just packing one up with a small LCD, a BT keyboard/mouse, and a honking 20k amp battery when I travel, instead of taking the laptop.
It is absolutely shocking to me how much better that little Ryzen is, for how little money.
I just replaced my older i7 CPU with a newer AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D, and itβs just absolutely RIDICULOUS how much faster this 3D V-cache (L3 cache) is when running Linux. Itβs just crazy, even when doing computational fluid dynamics (CFD, which is my field of work). Intelβs Xeon Silver/Gold/Platinum series processors cost THOUSANDS of dollars, whereas this Ryzen processor is $320. TWICE as fast as Xeon Silver doing the same CFD work.
I β€οΈ AMD. RISCV may win my heart, but weβre still a way out from comparable performance.
Itβs the threads. The 5 has 12 CPU threads, which plays really nicely with concurrent applications. Go - and other languages which make threading easy and which take advantage of the architecture - really shines. I love it.
Itβs a CPU/GPU combo chip, and the GPU doesnβt have separate memory. So some % is reserved for the GPU.
Beyond that, I hate swapping. I never, ever have to worry about running out of RAM. I can run multiple Electron apps at the same time. Originally, I thought Iβd be running Gnome or KDE, both of which are memory hogs. I can even run Java apps if I like
Itβs freeing, really. And given that it was, like, $100 for two 32GB modulesβ¦ why not?
