Which strong computer configuration to run FME

For most scenarios, FME will only use a single core*, so my recommendation would be

• Superfast CPU (select for clock speed rather than number of cores)
• Superfast RAM, and lots of it. Nothing worse for performance than having to swap to disk.
• Superfast SSD

Of course you'll want to run 64-bit FME when working with large datasets.

Completely agree with @david_r's suggestion. Would like to add: big screen!

Again to support the comments, the best thing that can easily be done is add lots of RAM. FME needs a lot of it for temporary feature storage, otherwise it slows to a crawl having to keep doing swapping of data between RAM and disk

Most of my workflows deal with large vector datasets rather than rasters, but I've hit 24 GB in consumed physical RAM without trying on some very large workflows, so 32 GB or 64 GB minimum would be a good start (noting that FME only can use this when running in 64 bit mode)

Interestingly, I've also found beyond RAM size and speed, what often gets overlooked in workstations is that almost all workstations will come with 2-4 memory channel capable motherboards, and often vendors and suppliers will cheap out and only use one DIMM slot as a cheaper way of supplying the minimum specified RAM (because most office PC spec sheets don't bother going into the finer details of how to configure the RAM and memory channels). When I've run almost identical PCs back-to-back, 1 using only 1 memory channel, and the other with the RAM instead with 2 x sticks across 2 memory channels, the performance increase in FME was significant (~30% on large test workflow), because it removes a bottleneck in the CPU being able to read/write to RAM across only one memory channel, which in turn throttles the performance of FME.

Sorry, to add, as @david_r says, having a very large SSD, preferably using NVME, makes a huge difference. A lot design work happens with the need to having Caching Mode On in FME, and with SSD vs mechanical hard drive the performance is night/day when either need to Cache, or you run out of RAM and memory pagefile swaps to disk are required.

Thanks for all your qualitative and enlightening answer. I learned a lot of things !