Here's some of my thoughts.
Focus on the amount of memory and type of disk.
Ideally you'd want to keep all of the VM's virtual memory in the systems memory - you don't want the VMs to be paging in and out. Add up the amount of memory that you're going to give to the VMs and add a few more GB for the host operating system.
Also you want a fast disk to store those VMs. SSDs are the best for performance. Preferably NVMe or Thunderbolt 3. USB-3.2 could be used in a pinch. No USB 3.1 or 2, and HDD disks are to be avoided if possible.
You also provide no information on how many VMs you are going to run and what the workload is anticipated to be.
The real issue I see with the 12th and 13th gen Intel CPUs is the breakdown between performance cores and efficiency cores. The i9-13900K has more cores than the Ryzen, but those are broken down between 8 performance cores and 16 efficiency cores. Your VM performance may not be great if the operating system decides to run your processes on the efficiency cores depending on workload.
The Ryzen has 16 cores - it does not look like they are performance/efficiency.
I'd choose the Ryzen for virtual machines personally.
However, depending on the number of VMs you are going to run, you may be much better off running them under ESXi rather than Workstation.
- Paul (Technogeezer)
Editor of the Unofficial Fusion Companion Guides
