Unless you are compiling massive projects then your best bet will likely be a 3900x. You get more cores then you can likely use to handle all the programming multitasking while also having a cpu that’s 5-10% off of the best gaming cpu available. All while keeping within a reasonable budget.

Without question, get the 3900x. It's a bit behind Intel in single-threaded performance, but only barely, and the embarrassment of cores you get compared to the i9-9900K more than makes up for it. Microcenter currently has it on sale for $379 if you buy it together with a compatible mobo, which is the deal of the century.

3900X is a fantastic developer desktop processor, great value.

Just get some nice fast DDR4-3600 CL16 RAM to go with it.

I recently built a gaming/developer PC, here is my part list (prices are NZD if you don’t want to have a heart attack):

https://pcpartpicker.com/list/2x4kb8

Handles any game I throw at it, and I can do 4K gaming for quite a few, though with 60Hz monitors you can see I’m not a hardcore gamer.

Plus I think latest security mitigations have reduced i9-9900Ks performance more than the R9 3900x.

IMO the 2500k deal beats it. Still running mine

I think Ryzen 3 is coming this year, so it might be better to wait a bit.

It's out and the darling of most tech news.

There is some confusion in their naming. Zen is the architecture name, and so far we've had Zen, Zen+, and Zen 2. The consumer processor line is branded Ryzen (and Ryzen Mobile for laptop parts). The HEDT processor line is branded Threadripper, and the server line is branded Epyc.

Ryzen and Threadripper 1000-series are Zen.

Ryzen Mobile 2000-series is Zen.

Epyc 7001-series is Zen.

Ryzen and Threadripper 2000-series are Zen+

Ryzen Mobile 3000-series is Zen+.

Ryzen and Threadripper 3000-series are Zen 2.

Ryzen Mobile 4000-series is Zen 2.

Epyc 7002-series is Zen 2 (Epyc skipped Zen+).

Zen 3 is expected in 2020, based on AMD guidance. Asssuming they follow their part numbering scheme, we should expect this to appear in Ryzen and Threadripper 4000-series, Ryzen Mobile 5000-series, and Epyc 7003-series.

Just built a new computer with this, 3900x is a great deal. For GPU the 2070 Super is great as well

For most programming tasks I would focus on the base of the pyramid: Make the storage low-latency for small files, then up the memory size and bandwidth, and then use a CPU appropriate to the workload(ideally, it can go wide and parallelize - otherwise you're back to single-threaded perf). This mitigates the worst case of poorly optimized builds that need to frequently return to storage, and it improves all factors of the operating system when it chooses to swap to virtual memory(Windows has become a very aggressive swapper since Win10 launched and they added a new page file system on top of the old virtual memory).

You can spend time gazing at the benchmarks for each CPU, but I would not pinpoint it as the bottleneck for a responsive and pleasant programming environment. The new AMD chips are good all around. The new Intels are still OK, but the top end probably too hot and loud to reccommend.

For gaming, high clocks/high single-threaded IPC remain the primary factors. Games are mostly designed towards a certain number of cores and speed of I/O. Fast disk and memory will reduce sources of stutter but this is dependent on how often the game tries to load something.

Lots of gaming benchmarks out there, but sadly as of yet there is really no dedicated hardware reviews for the software engineering space.

Others have mentioned Phoronix (linux benchmarking) but I would also recommend Level1Techs. They are the only reviewers I've found that actually (occasionally) dig into what kind of performance actually matters to developers.

Recently, they did a video on using the Threadripper 3990X for Unreal Engine game development[0]. Some useful insights came out of that, such as:

- Compilers favor large cache sizes (which favors AMD)

- Usually the biggest performance bottleneck isn't compiling the code, but running automated tests (especially when it involves running a bunch of VMs).

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQa6r6Ci1jg

Here's a compilation benchmark: https://www.anandtech.com/bench/CPU-2019/2224

I guess there are more gaming benchmarks because there are much more gamers than software engineers.

Compilation benchmarks are fine, and many review sources are adding them, but there's still a pretty big gulf between "compiling the Linux kernel/chromium" and a typical developer workload.

> I guess there are more gaming benchmarks because there are much more gamers than software engineers.

That may be true, but I don't think that's a sufficient explanation. There are plenty of benchmarks for other professional workloads, such as CAD, 3D rendering, video editing, and mathematical modeling for financial or scientific applications.

>can anyone recommend a resource for determining the relative performance of processors?

Anandtech has a section of benchmarks with many workloads. I used that for years to assess CPU relative performance. https://www.anandtech.com/bench/CPU-2019/2224

You can also look at https://hwbot.org/benchmarks , but it's harder to use.

Another good resource would be: https://www.notebookcheck.net/Benchmarks-Tech.123.0.html

It might not help judge performance for individual tasks, but PassMark's CPU listings (https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_list.php) should help with relative performance. The results have a multi- and single- core score which should help comparing different workloads.

In general the 3900X is really nice, and if I did it over again, would probably do that over the 3950X.. About my only complaint is 32gb ram modules aren't available in 3000+ frequencies, so 64gb is about the max prudent amount you'll get in AM4.

It depends on what you're shoving into docker, or how much you're building in golang...

As far as gaming, all the Ryzen 3000 series perform within a couple percent of any Intel CPU close to the price point... The 10900X might do another 3-5% better for gaming, but your electricty use will nearly double for that very minor increase, not worth it imo.

You can get fast and good latency 32 GB DIMMs now. G.Skill has 4x32GB 3600 18-22-22-42, timings not the best, but tighter timings always get harder at higher speed and chips. The 3200 kits are 16-18-18-38.

Edit: Corsair also offers 3200 kits I'm pretty sure, too lazy to look up their exact specs

Yeah you can but the prices though. In my area ram prices increased about 40% since December.

Other than price, why the recommendation for the 3900x over 3950x?

I don't own either, but in researching these processors, my guess is that price, or rather value would be the biggest factor.

One of the main value propositions (for a programmer) of going from a Ryzen 5 or Ryzen 7 to a Ryzen 9 is that you get double the amount of cache (and four times the amount of an Intel Core i9-9900K).

Both the 3900X and the 3950X have that extra cache. Aside from that, the extra 4 cores are going to have diminishing returns for most programmers, and the bump in boost clocks is minimal (though the ability to achieve those clocks with the same TDP as the 3900X is impressive).

Personal experience - 2700x with an SSD and 64gb of ram. Blazing fast working with large Java heaps etc, which is a lot of what I do. Gaming is a non issue as long as you have a decent GPU. Have a 1070ti right now.

That CPU is a bit outdated now, but just a nice benchmark to show the 3*x is definitely enough.

2700X, same 64GB but a 2080 and yes it's so damn fast for programming and gaming I haven't been able to justify upgrading to a 3900/3950 other than "ooh shiny - want it" which isn't enough on it's own.

If you're at all interested in a Hackintosh build (modern performance for a lot less money than what Apple charges), you have to go with AMD graphics cards.

I built a high-end gaming machine about a year ago (Intel 8700k, Nvidia 2080TI). While its an extremely good machine, I find that I absolutely detest Windows, even for gaming. Its unusable for me for doing development work.

The hardware I picked, with the exception of the 2080TI, were oriented towards being Hackintosh compatible. That mainly includes the motherboard and cpu. I'm now contemplating purchasing a top of the line AMD gpu and moving ahead with the Hackintosh project. Another benefit to doing that switch is that the AMD products are a hell of a lot cheaper than Nvidia's while offering very competitive performance.

If the rumors that Apple is moving their Mac line to AMD is true, then it would be a homerun

Almost every hardware website measures gaming performance. Anandtech is good.

Now programming is difficult. You might want to check phoronix, they have some programming-related workloads, like compiling Linux kernel.

Also you might want to check geekbench. It consists of a several real-world usage tests like AES, etc.

When I was looking for gaming benchmarks the problem I ran into was the games being benchmarked were never actual popular games so they mostly seemed irrelevant.

the "actual popular games" at a certain point in time are usually games that were released very recently. I suspect anandtech doesn't update the game benchmarks too often so you can more easily compare against parts that were reviewed before the newest games were released. they usually have at least one major title for each genre, so you can get a sense of how the part will perform in your favorite game. you can find benchmarks for newer games in YouTube reviews (I personally find jayztwocents to be useful for this).

I run one such ressource. https://www.pc-kombo.com/us/benchmark - a really rather big collection of single benchmarks, used to put all current and many older consumer processors into on ranked order. You can compare individual processors and if there are fitting benchmarks for a direct comparison, those will be shown (benchmarks comparing different generations of processors are rare). There is one variant for games, and one (with less data sadly) for general applications.

But the others are right, you should be looking for a Ryzen 3000, depending on budget 3600, 3700X, 3900X or even 3950X.

I recently built a system with a 3950x and a 2070 super and it has been great. This is the parts list I ended up with: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/4cMMXv . The system handles AAA and competitive games without any issues. I dual boot with windows 10 and Arch linux and it's been a great experience.

I don't know about specific tasks, but I've been using https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/ to compare CPUs.

If you go to /r/amd you will see that basically everybody over there hates userbenchmark.com because it's intel-biased garbage.

Just one of many threads from the last few weeks:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/fyhl1g/tim_from_hardwa...

The specific issue is how userbenchmark weights CPUs seems to be very coupled to Intel's specific ideas on how many CPU cores there should be, or at least very firmly stuck in the 5 years ago. So last year the weights were 40% for single-core performance, 58% for quad-core, and 2% for "multi-core".

The idea was this was supposed to be what games care about, but it isn't. Modern games have issues with even 6c/6t CPUs, such as the horrible 1% lows on the 9600K in Far Cry 5: https://www.gamersnexus.net/hwreviews/3407-intel-i5-9600k-cp...

It looks like Userbench has since adjusted to weight up to 8 threads of performance? Which is maaaaybe less trash if all you care about is gaming. But the Core i5 series still tops charts on userbench despite reviewers no longer recommending the i5's due to performance inconsistency.

They even make ludicrous claims like that the 9100F is perfectly fine for gaming, and is even 10% better than a 2700X. They seem to be basing this decision entirely on older games or games specifically built for as broad a userbase as possible (eg, CSGO, Fortnite & Overwatch). Meanwhile actual reviews say things like "The quad-core Core i3-9100F was hopeless in Battlefield V, pretty bad in Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey, fairly useless in The Division 2, and weak in Shadow of the Tomb Raider." https://www.techspot.com/review/1983-intel-vs-amd-budget-cpu...

So even if you're an Intel fan, userbench is still a terrible way to pick a CPU.

HWUB is not known for being particularly even-handed in their editorial positions. They tend to 'beg the question' by picking game suites that produce the outcome they want to discuss, and tend to over-reach on the conclusions.

"fairly useless" here is over 60 fps average in the heavy titles and 90-110 fps in the multiplayer titles, with a similar ratio of minimums as the 1600 AF (so no more or less prone to stutter). And that's with them loading the dice by picking the absolute most thread-heavy games they could find, most games the 9100F does comparatively much better than that.

And the reality is that Zen1 and Zen+ actually are pretty weak in gaming. Zen2 made a ~30% improvement over Zen1 in gaming performance (much better than the "average" gains for other workloads), and it's still 10-15% behind the fastest Intel processors. Zen1 especially was hot garbage in gaming, those thread-heavy titles aren't representative of its average performance. About all you can say is that it aged better than the 4Cs that Intel had on the consumer platform at the time (or the 8100/9100F/etc that followed), an OC'd 8700K lays a smackdown on it and an OC'd 5820K remains extremely viable even today.

I'm not going to defend userbenchmark's composite scores, but gaming performance does heavily depend on per-core performance even today. Having 8 faster cores is still more desirable for gaming than 16 slower cores. And single-core performance is a good analogue of "per-core performance" so this number remains very relevant.

> "fairly useless" here is over 60 fps average in the heavy titles and 90-110 fps in the multiplayer titles

You missed the point. The point was UB claimed the 9100F was 10% faster than a 2700X. In reality the 2700X absolutely massacres the 9100F in gaming performance. Higher average FPS, higher min FPS, etc...

Even the 1600AF trivially beats the 9100F.

> with a similar ratio of minimums as the 1600 AF (so no more or less prone to stutter).

1600 AF in Battlefield V: 126 average, 91 1% lows

9100F in Battlefield V: 116 average, 49 1% lows

That's not a similar ratio at all.

> Zen2 made a ~30% improvement over Zen1 in gaming performance

No it didn't. You're massively misrepresenting (or mis-remembering) Zen1's gaming performance.

https://tpucdn.com/review/amd-ryzen-7-3700x/images/relative-...

3.6ghz/4.4ghz boost 3700X is ~11% faster than the 3.6ghz/4ghz boost 1800X in 1080p gaming.

Even at 720p it's a 15% gap between those two, not 30% https://tpucdn.com/review/amd-ryzen-7-3700x/images/relative-...

> Zen1 especially was hot garbage in gaming, those thread-heavy titles aren't representative of its average performance.

No it wasn't. It lost to the equivalent Intel CPU, but it was far from bad. You could easily pair a Zen1 CPU with just about any GPU and never see a significant bottleneck. The exception being the absolute top-end. And, critically, if you had an older Intel quad core, like a 7600K, the Zen1/Zen+ CPUs were still an upgrade in gaming performance.

See for example at 1440p the gap between Zen1 & Zen2 & Intel being almost nonexistent even with a 2080 Ti: https://tpucdn.com/review/amd-ryzen-7-3700x/images/relative-...

> Having 8 faster cores is still more desirable for gaming than 16 slower cores.

Of course, but you still need enough cores to avoid stuttering. Which means...

> And single-core performance is a good analogue of "per-core performance" so this number remains very relevant.

Is not correct at all. Single-core performance isn't an analogue of anything these days. You need a minimum number of cores and good single-core performance.

And it's not just HWUB with these conclusions that an i5 is no longer sufficient. Gamersnexus has the same recommendations: "In more games each year, we’re noticing the cut-down Core i5 exhibiting high frametime variability that counteracts its fleeting performance superiority with unreliable, stuttery behavior. The AMD R5 3600 is more reliable and consistent in its performance across all games we’ve tested, making it the better gaming option." ( https://www.gamersnexus.net/guides/3533-best-cpus-of-2019-ro... )

> So last year the weights were 40% for single-core performance, 58% for quad-core, and 2% for "multi-core".

And for reference, they used to have it at 30% single core, 60% quad core, 10% multi core. But that didn't advantage Intel enough, or something.

> Modern games have issues with even 6c/6t CPUs

Any idea why?

It's really specific to Far Cry 5, and it produces some quite strange results that people are putting way too much weight on.

0.1% lows really tank on FC5 on processors without SMT, for example a 5.2 GHz 9600K has less than half the 0.1% FPS as a stock Pentium G5600 2C4T processor. In other words it's stuttering on the 9600K but running ok on the G5600.

https://www.gamersnexus.net/images/media/2018/cpus/2600k/int...

4C4T processors (R3 1200) do OK, but that one is AMD, so it isn't clear whether it's specifically something the engine is doing wrong around Intel processors, or if there's some hardcoded assumption that if there are 6+ cores then SMT must be available, or what.

But I mean, this specific game is not evidence that "6C6T is no longer sufficient for gaming", it's just a badly programmed game that has something going wrong under the hood on 6C6T processors.

The actual scores themselves are useful though. When it says "quad core: x% faster" or "multi core FP: y% faster" that is actually fairly accurate (as accurate as a synthetic can be). People just don't like the way userbenchmark weights these numbers in the composite score ("effective speed").

It's still a very useful site for comparing niche hardware that will never get a true review - how does a J5005 compare to a i5 750? How does a Xeon E5-1650 compare to a Ryzen 1600? Probably not going to ever be directly tested. The only alternatives are things like Passmark that are much less accurate. UserBenchmark lets you compare against all kinds of niche or rare hardware at will, that's an incredibly valuable resource. Some people are just so butthurt about the "effective speed" composite scores that they can't bring themselves to scroll past a single line, which is a little ridiculous.

Generally r/AMD constantly gets their panties in a bunch about something or other, it's constant conspiracies about how this or that is a NVIDIA or Intel backed conspiracy. Don't take them too seriously.

At times they have sent death threats because they didn't like the conclusion of a review. After the initial Ryzen launch they decided that Steve from GamersNexus (among others) was an Intel shill and started threatening his family. iirc there have been other "incidents" as well.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/5xkw1b/gamersnexus_rec...

(most of those "removed" posts are people justifying it because Steve is an Intel shill who put out a "biased review")

They really take the whole fanboy thing to a whole new level. It is practically a uniquely toxic subreddit, even among other "brand" subreddits, more like a sports team sub or something.

Interesting, I was not aware of this.

As it happens I am awaiting delivery of a Ryzen 5 3600, good to know it's likely to be even better than userbenchmark suggested!

beware of submitting data to UB:

UB stores passwords in plaintext, and emails them around.

https://plaintextoffenders.com/post/183587319928/userbenchma...

https://github.com/plaintextoffenders/plaintextoffenders/blo...