On Wednesday, March 10, 2010 11:41 AM, John R Pierce wrote: > Christopher Chan wrote: >> Hmm, I see at most a 50% increase in motherboard pricing from a dual to >> a quad socket motherboard and that is with a difference in feature set >> too with the quad coming with an extra onboard LSI 8 port SAS >> controller. That is hardly going up non-linearly. (taking an extremely >> narrow angle ;-p > > > did you price the quad socket CPUs ? they cost significantly more, Guess why I said 'extremely narrow angle' :-D > too. the newest processor chips are usually the dual socket > versions. Also, 4-socket servers may have performance issues caused by > 4-way cache coherency chatter, non-uniform memory access, and so forth. > /me looking at AMD solutions where those issues do not exist. Performance is almost linear. On the Intel side, a dual socket solution will even outperform a quad socket solution so if one is looking for Intel cpu solutions, dual socket is the only sensible choice. But that does not mean quad socket solutions should be discounted when an AMD solution will outperform the best Intel dual-socket setup available.