Expensive Quad Sockets vs. Ubiquitous Dual Sockets

The Number One Reason for Quad Socket

VMmark - which we discussed in great detail here - tries to measure typical consolidation workloads: a combination of a light mail server, database, fileserver, and website with a somewhat heavier java application. One VM is just sitting idle, representative of workloads that have to be online but which perform very little work (for example, a domain controller). In short, VMmark goes for the scenario where you want to consolidate lots and lots of smaller apps on one physical server.

The VMmark scores of the Xeon X5570 make some of the quad socket platforms look silly - once again. The 16 "Shanghai" cores are 13% slower and the 24 "Dunnington" cores are 15% slower than the eight cores with SMT of the X5570. While raw processing power and the excellent optimizations for Hyper-Threading are the main reasons why the X5570 is superior, we suspect it is not the only reason. We'll discuss this in more detail later in this article. Luckily for AMD, the quad Opteron 8435 stays out of the reach of Intel's best server platform.