Ryzen is for Programmers
I just recently completed a build myself. It was pre-Ryzen so AMD wasn't an option at the time. I went with the Intel i7-7700 (quad core) at 3.6 GHz.<p>I was surprised by two big things: high-performance devices are extremely affordable nowadays and processors have gotten a lot better despite minimal changes in clock speed.<p>I went on PC Part Picker and built my 'budget' device and my 'fantasy' device. It turned out they were just about the same. I couldn't really spend more than $1500 for anything better without jumping to server-grade parts.<p>Yesterday I played Halo Wars 2, listened to Spotify, kept Word, Excel, Edge, Chrome, & WEKA open, and was running an embarrassingly inefficient data mining program in Python via WSL, while running a Jenkins build server in an Ubuntu Server VM, and running TeamCity in a Windows Server VM.<p>Even on the Intel chip, which is presumably less good at multitasking than Ryzen, I just can't throw enough at it to experience anything resembling slowdown. 8 logical cores still seems to be plenty for most users, but I could see with even more VMs that one might need more. As an aside, it is incredibly nice to be able to run VMs without even thinking about their resource consumption - it's like having my own little cloud.<p>I wonder if maybe Intel's marketing for their chips could use improvement. On paper, my MacBook Pro with 16Gb RAM and 3GHz i7 shouldn't be that much worse than my desktop with 32Gb RAM (most of which is unused) and 3.6GHz i7. The difference in practice is night and day. I'm losing faith in the concept of a laptop as a developer's primary device (especially with SSH & Remote Desktop being so good these days).