CPU choice - more slower cores vs fewer faster cores?
I'm needing to choose some new server hardware for a database server and within my budget, I can get either of the two choices.
Which one will be the quickest performing for the following database...
1) two 6-core CPUs running at 2.5GHz (Xeon E5-2640) or
2) two 4-core CPUs running at 3.3GHz (Xeon E5-2643)?
The OS will be Windows 2008R2 (64-bits) which is limited to a max of 32GB RAM.
The database is 11gR2 Standard, about 70GB in size today, and typically has about 60-70 users hitting it from an ODBC connected Windows app. The app is a fairly even blend of transaction processing, record queries and report generation.
The current server has two dual-core, hyperthreaded 3.2GHz Xeons (from 2004 vintage, so they're nowhere as efficient for instructions per second as modern CPUs) and 8GB RAM, but it's 32-bit Windows 2003 Enterprise and suffers under the 2GB SGA restriction of 32-bit Windows, and when it's not under memory pressure, it seems to be mostly sluggish due to cpu speed issues, so I'm leaning towards the faster 3.3GHz quad-core chips in the new machine over the slower 6-core chips since I have my doubts that number or cores in this application is presenting any kind of potential bottleneck.
The old machine has multiple U320 SCSI RAID controllers, and separate physical channels for separate RAID-10 arrays with 15K RPM drives for data files, log files, and app files, so even today it's no slouch for storage I/O performance and I've never seen a bottleneck there. The new machine will have multiple SAS 6G controllers and separate RAID10 arrays as well.