Cores versus Memory

[PaPaTheGMan]

Hi everyone, I'm a newbie looking to learn Proxmox and virtualization. I have two hardware choices for starting my journey and would like some insight as to whether or not it is better to choose more CPU cores or more memory. I don't have any applications in mind, just want to spin up a home server to test various configurations and features, etc. Specifically, my two choices have the same architecture (X86_64), basic CPU speed, and the same storage.

The differences are:
#1 - Intel CPU (embedded Intel graphics) with 2 cores and 16GB of memory
#2 - AMD CPU (embedded ATI Radeon graphics) with 4 cores and 8GB of memory

Are there any compelling reasons to choose one over the other?

Thank you very much for any and all feedback.

 

[UdoB]

My expectation:

• when you have not enough CPU power all systems will get slow - but all VMs will stay up
• when you have not enough RAM the so-called OOM (Out-Of-Memory)-Killer will kill processes (=VMs),
  and no, swap files plus KSM plus memory deduplication will not always help

That said... I actually prefer AMD - so I would go for #2 and buy more Ram on the long run. Please make sure newly baught hardware is not maxed out already on delivery.

(My private systems have a maximum of 64 GiB installable - and I would really like to upgrade to 128 GiB. It always depends on what you want to do...)

 

[PaPaTheGMan]

Thank you very much for imparting your knowledge and experience. I appreciate your insight. Unfortunately, I can't upgrade the Ram on that device. The memory is soldered in. So, I guess I'll spin up the Intel unit since I'm not as much worried about speed as keeping the VM's live.