Guidance on CPU cores vs clock?

Wondering if anyone on the Unreal team can offer some guidance here. For development and running virtual production types of loads, what do you think is more important? To have a whole lot of cores/threads or to have a smaller number with a higher clock rate. For example on an intel I9 you can get 10 cores/20 threads at 3.6 ghz (overclockable to 5) on a core X you get 18/30 at 3ghz and on a xeon system you can get 56 cores at 2.7ghz

In theory you get more grunt with more cores, even though the clock rate is slower, but I’m wondering if Unreal actually takes advantage of all the cores or not? So is there any guidance here? What’s better for Unreal? Fewer fast cores or a lot of slower ones?

Unreal can utilize all cores you have. Compiling source code, shaders (so also cooking the game) will use 100% of CPU. There are a lot of multi-threaded jobs in the engine like calculating complex collisions.

2.7 GHz CPU isn’t too fast these days. And Intel i9/Xeon CPUs are terribly overpriced if compared to AMD.
Threadripper 3970X is probably the most efficient CPU for gamedev workstations: 32c/64t at 3.7 GHz. 64 core Threadripper was limited by I/O… Perhaps that’s not true anymore with NVMe supporting PCI 4.0, but its clock is only 2.9 GHz, so it doesn’t sound like that awesome deal.

However, Ryzen 9 3950X would give you the best cost/performance ratio. Or its successor that will be announced in a few days, probably 15-20% faster.