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Faster Core or Multiple Slower Cores
concerto49
Member
in General
Preface: no offers will be posted here.
What would a user prefer, say 2x 2ghz cores or 1x 4ghz core?
Why?
E.g. Would you rather have 2x cores from E5-2620 or 1x core from E5-1650?
Cheers!
Comments
I think you would be better going with 1x E5-1650, because there are less such offers.
If you'll correctly indicate, that it's 3.5+ (4.0) GHz CPU cores and it's a good (new, fast) CPU and use it in your advert - you can find more clients.
Shortly:
If you search for geek clients - go with 1x core from E5-1650.
If you search for noob clients - go with 2x cores from E5-2620.
P.S. Note, that with 4ghz CPU cores you should use SSD or SSD-Cached drives to make geeks interested in offer.
4 Ghz x 1 core
More cores, since not all of us need high speed cores. Besides, in a VPS environment, CPU will be shared anyway. Promotion-wise, you can say blazing 12 (or 24 HT) cores access!
Thanks for the replies. End of the day it'll be the same performance. I just want to see what people prefer and real world use cases.
It will be the same in that it'll be hard capped and not like current offers where you get fair share + suspend
That's a story for another day.
You will still get 4ghz worth - just either via 1 CPU or 2 CPU. That's the question
As to what this is eventually leading to - some sort of KVM offer with snapshots and other goodies, but this isn't about offers for now.
How can the answer be anything other than "it depends" :-)
At one point, Sun Microsystems sold a server (T2000) that had 32x1Ghz cores, with a single shared FPU between them. Sold tens of thousands of them because (along with adequate I/O and disk) they were excellent web servers, network pollers, etc. Lousy at other things.
HP has some goofy "project moonshot" thing that is a RAAS - I just made that up to stand for Redundant Array of Atom Servers. It's a similar idea - weak CPU but very broad.
On the other hand, you could probably beat either at chess and I wouldn't want to render the next Pixar movie on either.
For network operations, CPU is often overrated because it's rarely the bottleneck. I'd rather have faster disk, faster network, and more memory before I'd worry about faster CPU.
If its not too late I just wanted to put my opinion in on this. I would personally prefer a host that offered the 1 4.0GHz CPU. If I wanted to run for example, a game server, some of them are not multi-threaded so having the more powerful single core can help out in this case.
Intel was working on the Xeon Phi, and I remember hearing rumors of a 1000 core model, but their top model is only 61 cores. And $4129.
IMO it depends on what you are hosting. Sometimes more is better, other times faster is better.
If that was hyperthreaded that would be amazing.
like what raindog308 has said above, the answer is that it depends
Assume that your vps has 2vcpu.
Let's use a conventional backup method as an example. You zip/tar/7z your folder, and set it to use all the cores available to do it. Will the 2x cores from E5-2620 be faster than the 1x core from E5-1650? probably yes, probably no. It'd depend on the scheduler, I/O load, and etc.
However, this is because of the program that you're using can utilize all the cores. What if you're happen to be using a non-multithreaded program? Like a custom data parsing using regex that only utilizes single core? Then the one with the better single core performance would perform better(given the fact that the two processors that you're comparing as similar in terms of architecture. but still, I would rather have a better hard disk/SAS/SSD for it instead).
In the end, there's a lot of factors that governs it, so how it'll be pretty much undefined unless you're starting to give a specific detail.
p/s: I'll take the one with better per core performance.
It does have 4 threads each
no brainer, 1x4ghz
1x4GHz, since most applications aren't heavily threaded.
the reason why i would say more cores than faster cpu. Is because the way the linux kernel works. The kernel can run on a single thread handling all the system calls and while it handles the system calls all the other processes on the system will be able to run switching between them selves the kernel will never be blocking any other process.
If you're running a node.js server (and not using distribution) or a single threaded number crunching application then a faster core may help, however for most application servers (apache/mod_php/jvm - netty/jetty, etc..) it is a thread/process (almost same thing to a scheduler in linux) per request or even with async io most stacks are able to distribute over multiple cores (golang, http-kit via jnio etc).
If you're referring to a VPS then it won't have any tangible (or measurable) benefit because you're referring to shared cores which jack in terms of capacity planning, you're just arguing over pointless silly marketing spin (.e.g linodes free upgrade from 4 to 8 cores).
Slower, more cores vs less and faster any day.
Whichever results in faster unixbench.
It's exactly the same. Hence the question.
Then a single faster core. You can run a single process at very fast speed or two processes can share it at half the speed (normal task switching / time sharing). In the case of two slower cores you don't have a choice. There can be two processes at the slower speed or one process at the slower speed. You can't get a process running at the fast (4GHz) speed.
I think it all comes down to context switching. Assume there's a task that takes n seconds to complete on a 4 GHz CPU. If it's on a 2 core CPU at half the clock speed, it'd take a overall time of n seconds + context switching time. Since the task takes longer (per CPU due to the lower clock speed), then it's likely to be switched out more for other tasks on the system overall.