Hello all,
hope some of the experts here can shed light on builds so the community have an idea whether to upgrade their existing ones or for future build.
What is considered a high end build (Cores | Ram | TB )
What is considered a Mid Range build (Cores | Ram | TB)
What is considered a Budget build (cores | Ram | TB)
Accompanied by the estimated plot results.
High end:
Threadripper or salvage server. 32+ cores, as many as 128 cores or even more (?!)
Medium end:
12-24-28 cores
Low end:
1-8 cores
You’ll need enough fast disks as well to plot, I assume this is about plotting not farming…
Careful with that, many-core server processors often have worse per-core performance and for running that many parallel plots on the same system you’ll need more disks, maybe you’ll have to worry about I/O bandwidth, moving your plots to your farmers could get troublesome… you’ll also have to be careful setting them up (for example, if you have a NUMA system, you don’t want your plotting processes accessing resources from multiple nodes).
Multiple smaller systems are probably better here (though you don’t have to go that far down either, HEDT Threadrippers/Xeons/enthusiast gaming CPUs with moderate core counts seem pretty good).
Oh no, don’t tell @instrumentality this, he is going on non-stop about how the only valid cost effective solution is these old salvage 40+ core servers… 
Yeah indeed, I am sort of thinking that M1 Mac Minis with 16GB RAM and external Thunderbolt NVME SSDs would be a very space and energy efficient way of scaling this. I think you would end up spending about USD $1500 per TB/day. There are definitely cheaper ways but that seems like a really simple and scalable way to do it.