jmke

Do Six Cores Make Sense? The question is not theoretical. When Intel launched their hex-core “Dunnington”, quite a few applications did not make good use of it. The quad-socket “Istanbul”-based servers will face the same problems as “Dunnington”: some server applications prefer “2n cores”, a few will not scale above eight cores and many will not get past 16 very successfully. Yes, even in the server world, quite many applications do not scale well beyond 8-16 cores. Mailservers, webservers and even some databases may be in that situation. If your database gets a lot of locks on the same amount of data, locking contention will kill off your performance once you get beyond a certain number of cores. Rendering applications are another group that start to show diminishing returns with more than 8 cores. It is pretty likely that clustering dual-socket quad-cores makes more sense that adding more cores to the same machine.

http://it.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=3571

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