On Thu, Sep 16, 2010 at 8:24 AM, John R Pierce pierce@hogranch.com wrote:
Core I7 is the branding for the desktop CPU family. The Server processors are branded Xeon 5500 and 5600 (for dual socket servers) and Xeon 7000 for 4+ socket servers. Typically, desktop processors go with desktop motherboards which don't support ECC memory, probably don't have remote management features, likely don't readily support redundant power, and often have only a single NIC onboard. A server board will likely have significantly more IO bandwidth, oriented towards network and disk IO rather than graphics.
IMHO, the dual socket 5600 family is the sweet spot of price/performance for a VM host, with 2 x 6 cores, and typically 12 memory slots (2x3 per CPU). populate the memory with 6 matching DIMMs for best performance.
Yet the server vendors ship servers, with server chassis, hardware RAID, redundant power supplies, etc & offer Core i7 options. How does that work?