Metropol

i'm decommissioning an old windows domain controller and reconfiguring a new one.

we brought this server from dell (it was about £1200 excluding support). it has 3 x 300 gb sas disks, 4gb ram, dual quad core processor... just count them cores.

i can remember when £1800 got you a pentium p120 with 16mb of ram.

if i had £1200 to throw at a new desktop, i'd probably get a poweredge server instead, it starts windows 2003 enterprise r2 (64 bit) in about 8 seconds (after a 5 minute disk and drac initialisation, anyway).

Right, clear this up for me as I'm not down with the multi-core kids any more: dual quad core is 8 so why is it showing 16?

it's a dual quad core. well - that's what i ordered, that's what it says on the shipping note. you know, i didn't even notice there was too many. i'll check tomorrow and see if it's been specd incorrectly - installing the os was about as far as i got today, but that does seem strange.

Sput wrote:Right, clear this up for me as I'm not down with the multi-core kids any more: dual quad core is 8 so why is it showing 16?

A Quad Core processor is 4 brains on one chip.
The majority of "decent" servers are dual-processor setups, which is basically two processors. Two quad-cores for eight cores.
The processors most likely support Intel technology called Hyper-Threading, which effectively causes the operating system to think and report there are two cores when in actual fact there's one one. Therefore eight "proper" cores, 8 "virtual" cores if you like = 16 cores. Hyper-threading is the art of doing more than one thing on an Intel processor (simultaneously) rather than one after the other in traditional fashion.

you're right neil, each core has two threads.

Ah thought it might just be intel's weird trickery. My favourite part of this discussion is that you said "count them cores" when you hadn't yourself lobster

Actually having said that, the guy next to me in the office is running an Intel quad-core and it's only showing as 4 in task manager.

IIRC Hyper-threading was discontinued for the original Core Duo/Quad line because it was actually an architectural descendant of PIII, but has since returned for the newer i7 types. I...think.