Xeon x5550 vs Xeon x5260

[ehanson555]

Hi Tom's community. We are looking at possibly upgrading HP xw6600 workstations that have dual X5260 Xeons to the new HP Z600 workstations with X5550 Xeons. Does the new chipset architecture combined with the new Xeon chip offer a noticeable performance increase? We are not sure if we would go with single or dual CPUs at the moment. Is the drop in chip speed (3.33Ghz > 2.66GHz) something to be concerned with? Any input and comments is greatly appreciated.

 

[sminlal]

Caveat: I have no actual experience with either of these processors, so take these opinions with a grain of salt...

The X5550 uses the new Nehalem microarchitecture which seems to be getting better throughput for a given clock speed - so the difference between the 2.66GHz and 3.33GHz clock speeds might be a little less than the raw numbers suggest. Nonetheless, I'd still expect a single-threaded task to take longer on the X5550, other factors being equal.

What it really comes down to is the software and the workload you're running. If it scales well with multiple processors then the extra cores will be a net win. Otherwise I suspect you may not see as much difference as you'd hope.