This is a common topic that has come up within support numerous times and in this blog, we will discuss why configuring multiple cores over multiple sockets is more beneficial.
Let’s start with the Prognosis Hardware Recommendation help topics. Our help topics always quote the requirements as Dual Core, Quad core, Octa Core etc. It is important to know what the equivalent terms are in VMWare CPU Configurations:
- Dual core in VMWare is 1 Socket with 2 cores
- Quad Core in VMWare is 1 Socket with 4 cores
- Octa Core in VMware is 1 Socket with 8 cores
Note: Prognosis servers with 4 sockets x 1 core each is considered below minimum specification.
Common Mistakes:
We are seeing servers where the CPU’s are configured as 4 sockets with 1 core. This is not quad core. This is 4 CPU’s with a single core per CPU. Visualize this on a physical motherboard and then think of where you might purchase a similar configuration in the real world – You cannot.
Why does it make a difference?
In a multi-core setup, the windows operating systems can take advantage of the cores in a more efficient manner called hyper-threading and process threads from the same process simultaneously rather than sequentially. As Prognosis is a multi-threaded application, Prognosis also takes advantage of this feature and therefore performs more efficiently with less memory swapping occurring.
A thread is simply a single stream of data from a program through the processor on the system. Each application generates its own or multiple threads depending upon how it is running. With multitasking, a single core processor can only handle a single thread at a time, so the system rapidly switches between the threads to process the data in a seemingly concurrent manner.
The benefit of having multiple cores is that the system can handle more than one thread. Each core can handle a separate stream of data. This greatly increases the performance of a system that is running concurrent applications. Since servers tend to be running multiple applications at a given time, it was originally developed there but as personal computers got more complex and multitasking increased, they too could benefit from having multiple core processors.
Articles:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multithreading_(computer_architecture)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-core_processor
http://compreviews.about.com/od/cpus/a/dualcore.htm
