I still don't feel the need to upgrade but when I do this might be the first time where I really consider an AMD CPU. Things are looking really really solid for them lately. I could totally see using one for an all purpose development, video editing / recording and gaming box to replace this i5 eventually.
for the average user, not as much.
Actually there are workloads on which they will heavily benefit the average user as well. Image processing and video editing come to mind especially. You may argue that few users do this on a PC nowadays, but that's mostly oversight by OS developers. MS should revive Movie Maker. I used it a lot 10 years ago when my kid was little. Apple already ships iPhotos and iMovie with every new mac, and both of them are pretty great for what they were designed for. Then there's also more and more 4K content on youtube by the day. My 5 year old iMac does spin up its fans quite a lot nowadays.
I think it's also a good time to start moving some of the AI workloads to the edge as well. It's ridiculous that we have near instantaneous on-device speech recognition on phones now, but PCs still have to dial back home and incur perceptible latency. I want local speech recognition out of the box in Windows and MacOS (and ideally Linux as well), with automatic punctuation and robust to background noise.
I think the biggest perk is that AMD's new CPUs allow for faster hard drives which many people argue are more important.[2] This is my main reason for looking at one.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVAt4fz--bQ
[2] - https://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/Tip_2F00_Trick_3A00_-Optimiz...
But now considering upgrading that server to a r5-3600 anyway, as I've been using VS code's remote feature for development on the train, and that would still benefit for faster compiles.
Aside: I did a min-cycle upgrade to a good nvme drive (samsung 860) and a GTX 1080 when that video card came out, which was a pretty big bump on the old box.
In your day to day, how big of a difference is that drive vs a SATA SSD you might have bought 5-6 years ago?
I know going from a HDD to an SSD was a mind blowing experience but now things open so fast even on an old SATA SSD that I find it hard to imagine things can feel that much faster.
Not too much difference for most tasks, but man if you're doing a lot of work in node (or anything else touching lots of files) it's pretty significant. But ymmv on this.
Database work is significantly faster as well.
So don't spend too much! Just get something known to be reliable with a decent cache on it.
the claims in a sibling thread about a given web build being 30 seconds on a sata SSD -> 5 seconds NVME are not likely true, I think that poster may be assuming the differences would be that large.
I have a Samsung 970 EVO and I spend most of my time compiling with g++. Copying large files is nice but overall I find the disk cache in Linux mostly makes the drive performance irrelevant for compiling if you have enough RAM.
Also be aware that if you have an older motherboard with PCI-E 2.0, you'll be limited to 1GB/sec transfer rates anyways.
I also have 960 and 970 evos, they are mostly fine, but there's a fall in speed during writes, when the slc cache becomes full. The 960 is also starting to have longer trim times than it used to.
The 3950X should make my bluray rip/encodes go so much faster as well. I have a stack of a few series waiting to even rip, the older i7 I was using was just about painful how long CPU encodes took, and GPU encodes were really crappy, or too large (h.265/hevc). I cannot state how much I've been looking forward to a 3950X (since this time last year actually). Which should do well for me for the next 5+ years.
Assuming you're using "nuc" as a generic term, is there an AMD-specific search term I can use to find these rumors? I've been in the market recently for a nuc form-factor machine and I've wanted to go with AMD, but haven't found much.
[1] https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16856158066 [2] https://www.neweggbusiness.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9B-...