Dual Core or Quad Core?

[Warren Luebkeman]

On Friday 29 June 2007 1:27 pm, Jerry Feldman wrote:
> On Fri, 29 Jun 2007 09:53:05 -0400
>
> Warren Luebkeman <warren at resara.com> wrote:
> > I asked for a quote on a server yesterday from our hardware provider, and
> > the sales guy told me about a great new deal.  For the same price as a
> > Dual Core, 2 Ghz Xeon processor, I can get a Quad Core 1.6ghz Xeon
> > processor.  My first impression was four must be better than two, but is
> > it really?
> >
> > The server is supposed to be a 50 user Linux terminal server.  Our
> > current specs for this system are:
> >
> > Dual Processor Dual Core (4 Processors)
> > 6 GB Ram
> > 15K SAS Hard Drives
> >
> > So now I can build the same system, but with 8 processors vs. 4, for the
> > same price.  My thought is because its a terminal server, the speed of
> > the processors is less critical to the number of processors you have,
> > because you need to distribute the load of 50 users across one server.  I
> > can't imagine a word processor running at 1.6 Ghz vs. 2 Ghz should
> > perform any differently. So by moving to more processors, I should have
> > less processes running on each processor, which according to my very
> > rudimentary logic suggests that the performance should be better, or at
> > least, more efficient.
> >
> > What do you think?  Aside from the cool factor of having 8 processors, I
> > would like to make the RIGHT decision regarding what server I buy.
> >
> > I defer to the wisdom of the LUG to show me the way!
>
> Most of the previous posts have pretty well answered most everything.
> As Maddog points out, Linux scales well up to 8 CPUs, but much work is
> being done with 32, 64, and 128 by IBM, HP, and SGI.  In your case,
> it's not so much that you are going to stress the CPUs, it is more the
> I/O of loading the applications. Fortunately, Linux and Unix
> applications do a good job of mapping files to memory. So, as others
> have stated, quad core is definitely a win in your case.  The other
> thing to look closely at is the cache sizes. The 1.6Ghz vs. 2.0 Ghz is
> minuscule, but make sure you don't get less cache.

According to the salesman the Quad Core has more cache, so I guess I'm good 
there.

-- 
Warren Luebkeman
Founder, COO
Resara LLC
1.888.357.9195
www.resara.com