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The Dell PowerEdge R815 and its four 12-core AMD Opteron CPUs want to run many, many virtual machines, at a much lower Cost than Intel multicore
There's something different about watching a server process list spanning 48 logical CPUs. It invariably engenders a feeling of raw power, not because each CPU is fast but simply because there are so many of them. Those 48 logical processors show you just what the Dell PowerEdge R815 has to offer: It's a server that needs lots of work to do.
It's a little difficult to measure the Dell R815 and its four AMD Opteron 12-core CPUs against its competitors. The R815 doesn't have the clock speed of an Intel Westmere-EP CPU, but it does have twice the number of physical cores. It doesn't have the extended RAS features present in the Intel Nehalem-EX, but it does have a slightly faster clock and 30 percent more cores -- and a significantly lower price.
[ Which is the better blade server? See InfoWorld's "Blade server review: Dell, HP, and IBM battle for the virtual data center" and "InfoWorld review: Cisco UCS wows." ]
So rather than directly compare this CPU -- and this server -- to its Intel competition, it's best to look at it from a real-world point of view. And that view is of a box screaming for a virtualization workload while somehow avoiding a budget-destroying price tag. The R815 even includes nice extras such as sizable internal storage and array controller options, redundant SD card slots, and enhanced iDRAC management tools. Given that an R815 with four Magny-Cours CPUs Costs thousands less than a comparable server with two Nehalem-EX CPUs, it delivers better bang for the buck for sufficiently multithreaded workloads. (See my comparative test results, "AMD Opteron Magny-Cours versus Intel Xeon Nehalem-EX.")
Virtualization value leader
The Dell PowerEdge R815 is a beefy representative of the Dell PowerEdge server line. It's...