Expensive Quad Sockets vs. Ubiquitous Dual Sockets

What Intel and AMD Are Offering

Before we can dive into benchmarks, it is good to see how the vendors position their CPUs. Before we do that, here's a quick spec sheet overview of the most important AMD and Intel CPUs.

Excluding the low power models, AMD offers three hex-core CPUs and Intel offers two. The gap between the top Xeon models and the midrange is remarkable: the 7440 only has four cores. That means that there is probably - roughly estimated - a gap of 30 to 50% performance between the 7440 and 7450. That gap does not exist in the AMD line-up: the Opteron 8389 has also four cores but clocks 21% higher than the 8431. The performance gap is therefore small. The pricing reflect our remarks:

AMD feels that the E7450 is no match for the 8435. As a result, the latter comes with a pretty heavy price tag. Whether this is justified is easy to check, even if we do not test the E7450 in this review. As the E7450 is the same die as the X7460 at a slightly lower voltage and clock speed, the E7450 is about 7 to 8% slower than the X7460. The 2.4GHz 8378 is quite interesting: still clocked at a decent 2.4GHz, it is by far the cheapest quad socket processor. As the number of VMs that you can run on a server is often limited by the amount of memory and not processor power, a quad 8378 might make sense.

The question remains whether the best dual socket processors of Intel or AMD are a threat to the quad socket servers. Two X5570 will set you back less than $2800, while four Xeon E7420 start at $4700. Even a relatively entry-level X7430 2.13GHz based server (32GB, 4 CPUs) will cost in the range of $13000. That is three times as much as similar dual 2435 servers and 2.6 times as much as a dual X5550 machine. That is why we include the fastest dual socket machines in this test too.