I’m building a system I’d like to keep responsive with up to ten to thirty Qubes running at one time. Trying to figure out which cpu platform I should be looking at for building this machine. I’m guessing somewhere between 16 cores to 64 cores would be optimal for my workload. I believe the price shoots up a crazy amount around 32 cores.
My current Thinkpad can get a big sluggish at times while running Qubes. So, what’s your experience in terms of cpu selection while keeping Qubes highly responsive?
I’m running right now 4 app qubes, 13 qubes including Dom0 and services, 33 vCPU’s and CPU is almost idling (activelly I’m on app-forums qube right now, app-YouTube is idling) - 25-32% of CPU
I’m running on i5-1245U (low TDP, with YT 4k and mpv 4K at same time have power throttling), 8 e-cores, 2 p-cores, 32GB RAM.
But often I run 6 appVM’s and 8 services + Dom0 which totaling in 40 vCPU’s (15 qubes total) and in that time acivelly run YT (high cpu demand) and forums or other browsing.
With YT running there is high demand for CPU but as long as there is enough RAM then there is no mayor slow down.
Including Dom0. Probably some service qubes. But, most of them are separate Qubes for segregating different online accounts from each other.
I’m currently running a ThinkPad with about 3 to 10 Qubes up, and that thing can start running extremely slow at times. We’re just talking about rendering web pages. Not much outside of the browser and managing online accounts.
I don’t need this to be able to play the newest Doom on multiple Qubes. But, I do not want it struggling with rendering 30 browsers in different Qubes.
What is your current machine? Do you need laptop or PC?
I’m running on Thinkpad T14 Gen 3 Intel i5-1245U 32GB.
Except CPU with too low TDP (30W would be better) biggest constrain for me is 32GB ram.
Right now, with 2 appvm qubes (forum qubes and untrusted) and service qubes (dom0, sys-net, sys-firewal, sys-whonix, sys-audio, sys-usb and 2 vpn’s) I have 12GB RAM left.
Because of that, I’ve installed ungoogled chromium on every mayor appvm. It have “Memory saver” feature, that unloads unused tabs so appvm could have less memory attached and still works fine.
For example, app-forums for comfortable watching only this forum (15-20 tabs after night) needed 6GB RAM witrh Firefox - swapping kills it. Now I can work with just 3GB.
Yeah, I’m trying to build a higher price range machine. The Insurgo is what I’m looking to upgrade from.
I’m trying to build a workstation. I don’t need to do any gaming or 3D rendering, but I do need web apps to remain responsive on Qube’s end. Currently, the Insurgo struggles. I’m guessing that’s mostly a virtualization issue, which newer enterprise and prosumer cpus would fix.
I’m trying to figure out core count for the prosumer line of AMD or Intel. Something between 16 to 64 cores seem ideal. So, an i9 or higher. But, an x99 HEDT machine with 8 to 10 cores might be fast enough for my needs. So, it might be possible to get fast old hardware of the x99 variety, which is going to crash in price, from Windows dropping support.
An i5 does not sound like it would meet my needs as it struggles running multiple YouTube Qubes in 4k. That power throttling is concerning. I’m looking to build a serious virtualization machine to offload certain digital tasks. Using 30 Qubes allows me to separate each of those digital tasks to different secure sectors, so if one gets infected I don’t have to completely reinstall the operating system. The idea is to have a powerful, but budget friendly machine on my network that simplifies my network security.
You need at least 64GB of fast RAM - faster the RAM the faster gfx will be.
DDR5 dual channel or DDR4 quad channel.
Someone please correct me if I’m wrong but gfx as of now is that CPU is doing memory copy, so it’s better to have iGPU that operates on CPU memory than to have discrete GPU and making data travel from VRAM to CPU by PCIE lane and then from CPU to VRAM by PCIE lane when doing gfx.
If you go for X99 mobo then mainly chinese boards with soso BIOS is widelly available, maybe some ASUS but it’s hard to find and with Xeon cpus you need to use discrete GPU and with this boards are PCIE 3.0 only.
If you go for Intel then 12th gen i9 or skip right away to core ultra - 13-14th gen i9 will most likelly burn out.
With AMD prosumer you will have most of 16 core in R9: 3950X AM4 DDR4 (single core perf on pair with 10900F or R7 3800XT), 5950X AM4 DDR4 (single core perf on pair with 10900K or 12400), 7950X AM5 DDR5 (single core perf on pair with 12900KS or little slower than Ultra 235) and 9950X AM5 DDR5 (single core perf on pair with Ultra 265K). Any other will have 8 and less.
PS2: in september will have B650/R7 7700 8 cores for gaming rig then will do HCL an some tests along with old chinese X99/E5-2673v3 12 cores current gaming rig