MS U15 - CPU count vs speed

Hi Tuan, yes for 2D drawing and general 3D modeling the faster single core speed CPU you can get will still give you the best results as these operations do not lend themselves well to parallelization. We have introduced multi-threading support in some areas (visualization, Visible Edges calculation, etc) but a high core-count CPU will not give you much benefit in the areas you are focusing on.

The new VUE Path Tracer render will also take advantage of your GPU so that will also help improving your rendering performance.

I hope this helps,

Thanks Marco.

Hi Tuan,

Tuan Le said:

that it is still the case that a faster per-core CPU will be more beneficial than a CPU with higher core count for Microstation U15 for general 2D and 3D work

I agree with Marco: MicroStation (and the most of desktop applications) are primarily single thread, because it's how the software works: It waits 99.9% of time for user input, and today the most complex task - views related computation - is done on graphic card (DirectX 11). Only rendering can be efficiently split into multiple threads and it's where more cores will be used for 100%.

Tuan Le said:

say 4.7Ghz base 8 threads CPU vs 3.5Ghz base 16 threads CPU of the same generation. 

In my opinion it's an overkill. For general 2D work any consumer processor is more than enough (AMD is clear choice now because equal single core performance with Intel, and much better in multi-core, with less power consumption). Even for general 3D nothing top is really required (workstation level processors).

In my opinion much more important is to balance all PC parts: To have fast SSD (not SATA, but M.2), to use memory with speed equal to processor speed, and to use graphics card really optimized for DirectX (professional cards are often optimized for OpenGL).

It's subjective (and simplified a lot), but I thin that for a general work in MicroStation, "mid range gaming like PC" for lets say 1000 USD is equal as "workstation PC with Xeon and NVIDIA RTX card" for > 5000 USD.

With regards,

  Jan