[Alupis]

> Intel's first client processor supporting 16 computing threads and new DDR4 memory will enable some of the fastest desktop systems ever seen.

Not necessarily -- as AMD fans (I'm one) have seen, the entire "more cores is better" is not always true -- it heavily depends on the workload, and frankly, most games and programs are not utilizing these cpu's fully (yet). Now, put something like a 2 x 16 core Opterons in a server and you have yourself quite a powerful virtualization platform.

With that said - I'm interested in seeing it's price point and performance compared to AMD's offerings.

[tgb]

Price point (or at least MSRP) is given in the article: $1000 USD for the 8 core model.

[taneliv]

How well commonly quoted benchmarks (passmark, geekbench, cinebench etc) measure a processor as a VM host? Obviously single core benchmarks are somewhat representative, but miss things like cache sizes at different levels and hyperthreading. Are there benchmarks that would take those into account or would otherwise be good for planning VM host use case?

[Alupis]

For VM hosts -- the number of cores (plus their respective resources like cache, etc) are more important than how performant each core is individually. Usually for hosting companies, density is more important than raw performance, making 32 cores in 1 physical host very attractive.