Cerb
Elite Member
- Aug 26, 2000
- 17,484
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Virtualbox has favored AMD for some things for awhile. Aside from that, no.So, can the 8 cores of the FX-8350 actually "beat" the i7-5820K for virtualization workloads? Any hard data? Any anecdotal tales of wonder?
The main reasons for going with an FX in this case are:
1. The large cache on most FX CPUs helps in ways that don't show up too much on most benchmarks. Kind of like how the Phenom IIs felt a lot better than Athlon IIs than the benchmarks implied, and 4/6MB/die Core 2 v. 2/3MB models, and so on. That's a not a new thing. I recall noticing it as far back as 512KB L2 Pentium IIIs multitasking a bit better than the 128KB Celerons or newer 256KB counterparts. Virtual servers were among the loads the FXes were made for. It's basically impossible to find current quality reviews against Haswells, but the FXes did very well against Intel's up to a couple years ago, when PD was released (there are quite a few server and workstation tasks where the power usage is the only thing Intel really beat them at).
2. With dedicated integer units, the AMD CPUs don't suffer wonky performance from Hyperthreading, so can make for more convenient lab/test setups, if loading down some of the VMs, and/or using them for latency-sensitive work that may still tax the CPU. So, when giving logical cores to VMs, the relative performance is highly predictable.
3. A few mobos are out there supporting 64GB on AM3+.
Combine those with the relative costs, and the power use is really AMD's main failing, should it matter to you. As Intel's CPUs have gotten faster, and both HT and Intel's caches having improved along the way, I'm not sure the SB-era comparisons hold for Haswell v. PD.
To be quite honest, if you don't care about keeping latency of 1 VM very low, while another VM gets its CPU(s) loaded down, a Core i3 or A8 will work just fine.
So, I would say to get a 3rd gen generic i3 or i5 system, or a 4th-gen that you can verify works well, and not sweat it.
Given costs, and the option for ECC, I'd personally get a TS140 from an Amazon seller, with a Xeon E3-1225V3 ($360), or i3-4130 ($250), and then get a matching RAM upgrade from Crucial or Kingston, and some storage (note the limits of the case, though, when you go to do that). The case doesn't allow large amounts of internal storage (you can use the 5.25" to help add a few more HDDs, if you need to), but it's otherwise a very nice entry level server, for a low price.
Only if some specific resource that there's only one port for is needed. HT allows both threads to be issuing instructions at the same time. The execution units and scheduler doesn't "see" the threads, just registers. The shared L1 and L2 are much more likely to be an issue for any non-number-crunching load than execution units (note AMD having a huge L1I, separated small L1Ds, and write-through to minimize contention/bouncing between cores).That doesnt mean the core can always execute two threads simultaneously in SMT. If both threads need the same resources(execution units) then only a single thread can be executed per cycle. In CMT like Bulldozer, you can always execute two Integer threads simultaneously per cycle.