I’ve got my eye on a new 10-core AMD w/ iGPU laptop that’s perfect in almost every way. The only thing holding me back is that it has only 32GB of onboard RAM. Ideally, I’d want to run a few sys-vpn qubes simultaneously, in addition to the default sys-qubes, in addition to extra sys-firewalls. On top of that, I was really wanting a PC that could run one or maybe two apps per qube (so I may have 5-8 qubes running with everything else). So far we’re talking about 13-18 qubes running in tandem. And this doesn’t even mention things like running several tabs in at least one of my browser qubes.
I know Xen adjusts RAM as needed, and evidently it’s pretty good at it. So do you think 32 will be enough for what I want to do?
Just running the bare minimum qubes at startup (dom0, sys-firewall, sys-whonix etc) takes 10-12gb so that leaves 20gb for everything else you list. 32gb total would be insufficient for your use case. I use less appVMs and 32gb would be my minimum (and I’d want option to later upgrade to 48-64gb). I suppose 32gb might be doable if some of the appVM qubes were running minimal stuff. Eg. You could get away with 2GB on a qube just using keepassxc
AMD is generally a less reliable install than Intel CPU. I’d only go AMD if I was buying used/discounted or I had a generous return policy.
The only thing that scares me away from Intel are the e-cores. I know you can pin VMs to certain cores, but I don’t know how reliable that is. Also, to run dom0 on just the e-cores requires a script to repin it at each new boot, which seems a bit much. I guess I just like AMD’s reliability. And I personally haven’t had any trouble with Qubes and AMD before. Not discounting what you’re saying, but I guess I’ve just been lucky.
And yes, one of my AppVMs would run KeePassXC, another Kleopatra, maybe two Firefoxes, one FreeTube, etc.