16-way Windows Box? You don’t see this very often.
Yesterday we received, at work, a new server which will soon be tasked with running a high-load, SQL query intensive application. It’s a Quad-Intel Dual Core 2.66 GHz machine w/ 8GB of RAM and two 280GB RAID10 arrays. Since each of the 4 CPUs are dual-core, there are a total of 8 cpu cores to crunch through data. The catch, though, is that each of the cores are hyperthreading-enabled, so each of them shows up as two processors to the operating system. You do the math…the operating system thinks that it’s running on a 16-way system. I’d love to be running linux on this beast, as I believe you could squeeze quite a bit more raw processing power out of it…unfortunately, the application destined to run on this server is windows-only (for the time being). Nevertheless, geeks like myself seldom get to play with hardware as powerful as this, so I enjoyed myself immensely.
See this picture for a graphic illustration of the 16 CPUs.
Erik, this server could be running Linux if we can prove it performs better. The full database product is supportred on Linux.
You want to fork out for a replica server so we can test side-by-side?
Sounds like a perfect server for VMWare ESX Server and about a dozen virtual machines…