Back in my day, when I was following this stuff closely, we didn't have none of this fancy DDR5 ram. No, good old DDR3 was enough for us. And we thought a 14nm process node was small! Imagine that! 14nm! Why, might as well be Core2 by today's standards!

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Anyway, despite following this stuff for a while, I haven't really paid close attention since the launch of Zen. Zen 1. The OG Zen. What I've been doing hasn't required me to pay more attention, until now, when not only is the old computer [a FX-83something w/ 20GB of RAM and a GTX 1060 3GB--I asked for 6, got 3--that replaced a 560 because that's how GPUs were back in 2020 and, apparently, very little has changed] getting rather hot and noisy--more than typically so for a construction core--but is grossly insufficient when I want to clobber together 5 open-source transformer models into an unholy resemblance of life. I mean, ultimately, all this stuff gets deployed on remote servers and such [I'm futzing about with high-bandwidth ARM instances as we speak], but I need something a little more potent under my desk.

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So I've gone out and parted myself out a build. My priorities are:

1) small--I prefer small aesthetically, and frankly, I could use something a little more portable.

2) RAM bandwidth--this is the biggest bottleneck on LLMs today

3) LLM/Machine learning performance

4) Virtualization performance [sometimes you really need five Linux VMs running at once to test stuff out easily, y'now?]

5) gaming performance, but this is way back there

6) can be converted to a server in the near future with mere addition of a few 2.5" flash SSDs

7) official windows 11 support [jk]

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Henceforth lies the obligatory PCpartpicker list. That, at least, has not changed.

PCPartPicker Part List

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Points of concern:

• I've heard the i5-13500 and below use the 12th gen Intel architecture, while 13600 use 13th gen. Not sure I want nominal 125W TDP for the extra $50 though...
• Are Intel chips still fucky with the TDP? This is a bit of a concern since, y'now, ITX and all that
• There's not any reasonable competition to the Arc A770 if my constraints are "does not cost a bajillion dollars and has 16GB of RAM" right? NVIDIA seems to have cut down on their RAM to sabotage DL/AI customers. AMD has shite software support and the new RX whatchamacallit only has a 128-bit bus anyway, despite being 16GB, while Intel seems much more keen on supporting this stuff. Waiting for Battlemage also seems a losing proposition as it's unclear if it will even have 16GB of RAM.

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Apologies for the long, rambling post, I mostly just want affirmation that I haven't completely lost touch and that I haven't badly misunderstood the market situation presently.