Server CPU? - Xeon vs Core2 vs Opteron

[latrosicarius]

Does anyone have any opinions on what is the best type of server CPU?

Or, if you have any reviews on the most latest products I would be thankful. My fear is that I am reading old reviews, so I might not have the latest info.

Thank you

[SiM]

Probably Xeon at the moment. But it depends on what you are serving... a Celeron is adequate for some servers

[latrosicarius]

Oh sorry, i should have mentioned what it would be for. It would be like a workstation to offload MATLAB, video encoding, etc, so it would need to be pretty good i think. I was planning to go with 2 quadcore CPUs on it, and i haven't decided 1U or 2U. Hopefully 1U if heat is not an issue, but i can deal with 2U if its better for the CPUs.

[SiM]

Yup one or two core 2 or xeons would be the best... they are the same afaik, except the xeons might be made out of better silicon so can run at higher overclocks or lower volts.

Matlab will do better with a high CPU frequency since afaik it is single threaded (I might be wrong, so check this first), so if you do a lot of matlab 2 higher clocked dual cores will be better than 2 lower clocked quads. Video encoding will be better with quads though

[latrosicarius]

thanks

[circuitmonkey]

Matlab will do better with a high CPU frequency since afaik it is single threaded (I might be wrong, so check this first), so if you do a lot of matlab 2 higher clocked dual cores will be better than 2 lower clocked quads. Video encoding will be better with quads though

This was my understanding, although with the parallel processing toolbox you can run several different instances of Matlab on the same machine (each having an affinity to a different core) and then share the work among them. this will mean some heavy modification of you code to make it properly threaded