Ran the ~10GB CFD bench on a few of my machines, for giggles and/or reference points. In chronological order by CPU release date:
| Time Taken | Hardware | Operating System | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1h 52m 52s | Xeon 2630L v4 (10c/20t 65W TDP), 256GB (4x64) DDR4 ECC LRDIMM @ 2133 | Win10 Pro | OS resided on a Samsung 950 Pro NVME drive. CPU steady states around ~45W per HWInfo64. |
| 1h 28m 25s | Xeon 2630L v4 (10c/20t 65W TDP), 256GB DDR4 ECC LRDIMM @ 2133 | Pop!_OS 22.04 | Same OS install and same BX500 SATA SSD as the T470’s result set below |
| 3h 48m 45s | Thinkpad T470 - i5 7200U (2c/4t), 64GB RAM @ 2133 | Pop!_OS 22.04 | Definitely good for email and browsing  |
| 2h 32m 26s | Thinkpad T480 - i5 8350U (4c/8t), 64GB RAM @ 2400 | Pop!_OS 22.04 | Same 3200-capable RAM kit as was in the T470 |
| 1h 43m 8s | Lenovo Legion 5 laptop – Ryzen 5600H (6c/12t), 64GB DDR4 @ 3200 | Win11 Home | Quiet power plan (~25W CPU package power at steady state per HWInfo64). |
| 1h 32m 6s | Lenovo Legion 5 laptop – Ryzen 5600H (6c/12t), 64GB DDR4 @ 3200 | Win11 Home | High Performance power plan (~45-50W CPU package power at steady state per HWInfo64) |
| 0h 41m 59s | Ryzen 7800X3D (8c/16t), 64GB DDR5 @ 6000 | Pop!_OS 22.04 | Several background tasks present during the run. Machine required -3drend sw to run |
I included the T470 and T480 results as the 7200U and similar is the current cheap cast-off low powered info worker business stuff, especially in the mandatory Win11 hardware upgrades flood we’re likely to be in the next couple years. Mostly for homelab hobbyist notes on what kind of compute you get for the money. As a comparison point on the 7200U, at least with Passmark it’s roughly equivalent compute to a Raspberry Pi 5 and the N5105’s of the world (source). Still, interesting seeing that the scaling wasn’t linear with core count between Kaby Lake and the refresh of it, even with the bump in memory frequency. Didn’t have the tooling to confirm if the 8350u had dropped back to base clock (1.7 vs 2.5 for the 7200u), but probably.
Past that, also interesting seeing how the typical recent-ish gamer laptop and/or mini PC CPU does against one of the lowest power v4 Xeons. Especially when the power budget was scaled down on the Ryzen. x99 CPUs are cheap, but it’s not a platform I’d buy into now if I hadn’t already had one collecting dust in the corner. That perf uplift from swapping OS’s, though… not entirely surprised, other than just how much it moved.
On the -3drend sw front, the only box that required it was an AMD GPU under Linux (7900XT). The x99 has an Intel ARC A380, the Thinkpads are intel iGPUs, and the gaming laptop is not in hybrid mode and has a RTX 3060. For what that’s worth, anyway. 