16": 8C 16GB or 6C 32GB?

[poematik13]

What are your guys' opinions on each? I'm looking at either the 8 core with 16GB RAM or the 6 core with 32GB RAM; the ones I priced out are within $50-60 of each other. Would 16GB RAM be a bottleneck for an 8-Core CPU? I know the rule of thumb is 4GB per core and all. 8 core 32GB is out of the budget.

My use cases are mostly: emails/chrome/MS office/Pages/Photoshop and every now and then I'll be running 4K footage through DaVinci Resolve or FCP X. Perhaps even a 6C 16GB will suffice for this?

Also keep in mind I'm maxing out the GPU no matter what (8GB 5500) because for $180 it's a great value and the 8GB VRAM goes a long way for Resolve.

 

[jdiamond]

Because of your use of Davinci, I'd lean towards 32GB RAM. The thing about 8 cores vs 6 cores is you're limited by processor speed and thermals, so I don't think you'll really get a 33% speedup with 8 over 6, and most things will never use all the cores (except for FCP and DaVinci of course). What are you using right now? Do you ever approach the limits of 16GB RAM? (BTW a huge shout out to the maker of Mac Turbo Boost Pro! By disabling turbo boost, my laptop is quiet enough to bear again.)

You could always make the rationalization that anything you're doing that's too slow on a 6-core i7 is probably better served by a GPU. And your maxed out GPU should be around the speed of a Vega 20, and the Vega 20 had 1,280 lanes running at 740 MHz. I'd say that's roughly comparable to ~22 i7 cores dual AVX2 compute power.
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BTW, the amount of RAM you need isn't related to the amount of cores you have, but the size of your problem, and the nature of the data access. For example, if you're lucky enough to sequentially stream your data, you might be fine investing in Apple's incredibly fast SSDs instead of RAM. But if you need to random access stuff, RAM capacity matters. As one example, uncompressed 8-bit 4K video takes about 1.5GB/second/layer. More cores can crunch a problem faster, necessitating higher speed SSDs to keep the pipeline full.

 

[poematik13]

What are you using right now? Do you ever approach the limits of 16GB RAM?

Thanks for the detailed and insightful answer. Right now I'm on a 2019 13" MBP with a quad-core i5 and 16GB of RAM. I see pretty chunky swap files in Activity Monitor but the memory pressure always stays green. FCP X works smoothly on this, Resolve is adequate; it chugs and struggles to get realtime playback but it's still very much usable. Hence why I'd like to upgrade. I also have a Sonnet SEL chassis connected via TB3 with a BlackMagic Decklink that sends an SDI signal to a reference monitor, as well as a TS3+ that handles all my USB project drives

I think a dGPU would be a huge difference over the intel iGPU this one has. All my office tasks on this laptop work fine obviously.

All my project footage is stored externally usually on 3.5" 7200RPM drives that get about 200-225MB/s read and write. Sometimes if I'm lucky they give me a USB 3.1 gen 2 SSD which totally flies.

What do you think of a 6C/16GB/5500M 8GB as an upgrade? It's cost effective...or maybe I'll just go with 6C/32GB/5500M like I initially thought