On Friday 31 August 2007, Erick Perez wrote:
Hi people, Do you have pointers to web documents that help me make comparisons between buying a server with two quad core 2.33 ghz or buying a 4 dual core 2ghz server? I am trying to answer a question of performance. It is not important the redundancy/failover or the price of the server. Just the performance. obviously all the hardware specs are the same, the question is the CPU.
If you do pure IO workloads, the 4 dual cores are probably going to be as fast as the 2 quads because of the clock differences.
For CPU bound workloads, the quad cores will beat the duals easily because of the higher clock speed (and more efficient caching in case of AMD).
The only other things I would worry about is the number of memory slots. Usually boards that have 4 cpu sockets have a larger number of memory slots too. So if you need lots of ram, you're better off on that.
Peter.