Posted on February 16th, 2011Almost a decade ago the choices for server hardware CPU were limited mostly to the few main designs that ran an array of proprietary operating systems. Sun SPARC chipsets created for the Solaris UNIX operating systems were widely used in the financial and online arenas which were just starting up. On the other hand, Intel CPUs were used for Microsoft Windows environments in the corporate arena. Giants like HP, IBM and digital devised their own CPUs to integrate with their operating systems.
It was a time when Apple was almost nowhere on the scene of server systems and desktop environment. With the passage of time the hosting industry was taken over by multiple conquerors, the most prominent being Linux open source operating system. Linux was able to quickly overcome proprietary UNIX range like HP-UX, Solaris, AIX etc. so much so that these operating systems had to become open sourced themselves while including core Linux features themselves.
Linux system was developed to be modular and could be used across platforms and for this reason it became popular for use on a variety of chipsets including SPARC and Intel chips. Then started the battle of competitive prices and Intel slightly ran ahead in the race to win customer’s approval. Nowadays when you have to select a hosting provider you would be weighing both options of “Wintel” and ‘Lintel’ (Linux OS on Intel CPU chipset). Recently, the Intel Xeon has come up as the most popular option which is available in 5600, 6500, and 7500 series.
In 1999 the Xeon CPU line was created with Pentium II Xeon chip. With subsequent releases the Pentium brand name was removed from the line. Now, the Xeon CPU is available in both 32-bit and 64-bit infrastructure which includes single, dual, or quad-core configurations. The terminology of CPU designates a “core” by one processing unit within chip and a “quad” by 4 processing units. In the same way the Intel Xeon CPUs introduced in 2009 and later, like the 7400 “Dunnington” chip and the 7500 “Beckton” chip were multi-core chips that could provide support to eight cores and as much as 24MB Level 3 cache on-chip.
The AMD Opteron series is the main competitor of Intel for server CPUs. AMD Opteron CPUs also provide multi-core options like the 12-core 6100 series CPU release of 2010. The Opteron CPU is technically advanced than Xeon CPUs as was evident in the execution of x86 32-bit apps (which were not handled well by the Xeon chips in an earlier instance).
Conclusion
When you want to go for CPU you should not just focus on chipset for performance measurement, hard drive speed and disk access routine can affect system operations in a major way too. Finally the software incorporated in the server design and implementation largely affects the performance of CPUs. Experienced developers have seen a lot of applications being degraded when run on badly designed SQL queries. Hence, try to take in the bigger picture when you want to design your computer environment of a good standard.