Ryzen 3950 as a multi purpose machine, DAW inclusive. Will this work?

Configure and optimize you computer for Audio.
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Dear All,

I would like to change my DAW from an old rusty hexacore HP workstation that in its performance is equivalent to a 3770k. Additionally, I also want to get rid of another computer for other purposes that I got, plus not having to buy a 3rd computer that I need for yet a different purpose.
So my thinking is that if I buy a Ryzen 3950 system with 64 GB Ram, I can cover these needs:

One virtual machine that in itself needs 8 GB RAM and 2 cores, within which are 2 other VMs that also will eat up 2 cores each.
Another virtual machine that will eat up 16 GB and 2 cores.
The main host for all of this, that´ll be the DAW, and have the remaining 24 GB and 8 cores.
The performance of the Ryzen is, as far as I´ve understood it benchmarks, 50 % higher per core than an i3770k, hence this should give me a DAW that´s 3 x stronger - measured on CPU-power, and at the same latency as my old system. This is when having deducted the previously mentioned ressources, allocated to VM´s.
So the big question is: Will the stability and smoothness be as good as if this was a standalone machine with a CPU with the same core performance as Ryzen 3950, but only 8 cores, or will the VMs cause alot of glitches and stuff, even if they´re not sharing cores and memory with the host?
Best Regards

Roman Empire

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It will not work...
Sadly audio processing, DAW/VST/etc is a kind of process that does
not allow much parallelism and it is very time sensitive...
For this type of real-time sensitive task you want *ALL* the
resources allocated only for that real-time task, any other concurrent
task will disrupt the process and you will have problems with latency/spikes...

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As @Pictus suggests, this won't work--at least, not if you actually plan to run your DAW and VMs at the same time. While hardware virtualization can (for the most part) segment processor core and RAM use, you're still using one processor that doesn't share some functions efficiently between the cores--not as efficiently as a DAW would need, anyway.

That said, this would be a great machine for VM use and anything that doesn't require time-sensitive tasks, if nothing else.

Steve
Here's some of my stuff: https://soundcloud.com/shadowsoflife. If you hear something you like, I'm looking for collaborators.

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Thanks everybody, at least I know now - also had my doubts :)
Best Regards

Roman Empire

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