IR CPU

[JF]

Hello there,

I work in Archviz. The feature I care most about in Corona is IR.  I have a decent farm for final renders but I find myself using IR all the time to test scenes.
I am looking to upgrade the hardware for IR.
What are the software and hardware limitations of IR?
Does it have a core limit? I am looking at threadrippers, but I've heard that there is a core limit? Does it pull from the GPU more than renders? Etc... Any chance of using IR with several nodes/computers in the future?

[maru]

IR and regular rendering in Corona are almost the same.
Corona likes both many threads and high frequencies, so ideally you need a CPU with as many cores as possible and as high frequency as possible. That is why Benchmarks are very accurate for predicting performance:
https://corona-renderer.com/benchmark/results
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/

AMD CPUs definitely offer amazing price-performance ratio. The new 3rd generation Ryzens are totally crazy, and somewhere near September 3rd generation Threadrippers should appear.
The only place where Corona uses GPU at all is the NVIDIA AI denoiser.