But this does not change the fact - confirmed by the AE product manager, fer crissakes - that when you enable the preference for multiprocessor rendering, this specific feature can only really use the physical cores, and one should not spend more than needed buying RAM strictly to feed virtual cores during multiprocessor rendering, as you won't see a gain. 

To give an example: With my 12 real + 12 virtual core Mac (which the OS reports as being 24 cores), a sweet spot would have been 36 or so GB of memory so I could reserve the recommended 3 GB per 10 cores (reserving 2 cores and 6 GB of RAM for other functions), rather than spending money to install (22 x 3) + 6 = 72 GB when it would not be taken advantage of for multiproc rendering. (Me, I underspent and only put 24 GB in it, riffing on outdated recommended practices that you only needed 1.5 or maybe 2 GB per process. I regret that, as I'm not getting the multiproc boost I should have. OTOH, running two Quadro 4000 cards has been nice, but that's a separate well-tread discussion.)

Aside from that specific use case, in general more RAM is good (esp. for large format work like SV2's, as well as more caching etc.), and more cores - both real and virtual - are good to accelerate other parts of the program. I never said otherwise. 

I understand various people have real empirical data that changing certain numbers gave certain results, and I don't dispute that. But there's a difference between speculating at how the two may be connected, and learning what is actually going on underneath the hood.

Hey - I'm just trying to share some obscure (and unexpectedly controversial!) knowledge to help fellow users spend their money wisely.

back to work - 

Chris