Better computing solutions

[kjendro]

More of a technical question, but does the PowerBI desktop solution scale with more cores/threads? What about memory speed/size? Does Power BI use GPUs in calculations (especially in Power Query and data refresh)? Dealing with large datasets and looking to see if throwing more resources can improve down time.

[Greg_Deckler]

Well, yes. Power BI's core technology is SSAS tabular cubes. Power BI Desktop actually runs an instance of SSAS under the hood and SSAS is quite scalable. On the Power Query side, this depends on how big your dataset is. Are we talking 10M, 100M or 1B rows here? But, if it is big enough, then you may need to look at other options such as Direct Query. Also, you should look at Incremental Refresh if it is import mode. Futhermore, you shouldn't be refreshing large datasets from the Desktop anyway really, use the Service.