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DF Dwarf Mode Discussion / Re: Pathfinding is not a major cause of FPS death
« on: January 31, 2023, 11:30:48 am »older generations of intel core are also worse than newer ones, believe it or not, and the best CPU on the market for playing dwarf fortress is probably an 8-core AMD CPU, and, as of next month, a 16-core CPU with 32 threads... because it has 144MB of L2+L3 cache.
This might not be entirely true. The cpu cores in the upcoming 12 and 16 core 3D v-cache CPUs from AMD are split over 2 dies, and the increased chunk of cache is actually only present on one of those dies. Also critically for single threaded apps only cores on the die without the extra chunk of cache can boost up the max advertised frequency. Granted the faster cores can still access the big cache on the other die, but that's only after it's already checked it's own cache and at the penalty of increased latency. This higher cache latency might negate the clock frequency benefit to the point where the 8 core is just as fast as the 12 & 16 core in single threaded cache bound apps like DF. I'm also wondering if our OS's thread manager is going to be aware of these split-cache chips and will be smart enough to schedule threads onto the most appropriate cores. I guess we will have to wait until somebody has run benchmarks with these CPUs to see.