Depends what you are going for. 7000/9000 series have way more per-thread performance than threadripper.

Another quirk with single CCD 7000 chips (which I have as well) is that the infinity fabric limits effective bandwidth to the CPU cores. Even with two channels, you hit diminishing returns with higher speeds, especially if you aren't using the IGP.

You can get around it overclocking the IF, but it gets complicated and its much easier to do with 9000 series CPUs.

Machine learning/data science stuff.

Local LLMs is half of it.

But that aside, I found myself working with huge files that swapped like crazy on my 32GB of RAM, or were completely infeasible to work with. Janky local experiments I wouldn’t want to run on a cloud instance billed by the minute.

128GB has been a godsend, but I could completely fill 192GB and still swap some if I had it.

But I found there are happy side effects to having so much disk cache, too. For instance, game modding/tinkering has sped up immensely over 32GB. So has hashing for transfers, or other scenarios where it’s useful to already have a file cached in RAM.

ah fair enough, worst case scenario if they dont know what to do with that much ram (I would build a homelab) they could also have a ramdisk

If you're able to have swap, Zswap is supposed to be better.

Zram is intended for devices with no swap