4 syst. block P4 or Core 2 Quad for webserver?

Question

Clusters

What will be more powerful, say 4 syst. block with old Pentium 4 or one with Core 2 Quad (+Raid) for webserver? Let the RAM be the same in total, here and there.

It's just that the inquisitive brain does not give rest, maybe someone tested it or has information :)

Answer 1

Do not look for a place to compare! IMHO, it is necessary to look at a solvable problem first of all.
and secondly, all the technical and economic components…
(from the power of processors… to the cost of electricity…).
In some cases, the first will be better, in some the second. There are no universal solutions...

Answer 2

P4s will take up rack space, consume electricity, and still not provide the same performance as a single core2 quad. At the same time, there are much more problems due to the fact that the pieces of iron are older and they have a much greater chance of dying.

Answer 3

i7 will be clearly more powerful. And the core architecture is much more successful than p4 and even the quad will be more powerful.

Answer 4

A lot of nuances.
The memory on the old machine is slower. Yes, but it also refers to it as many as four cores.
There is a raid on the new platform, but with a large number of small files, a situation is quite likely when there will be a lot of siks, and it depends on the structure of the raid - will the heads walk in parallel or independently?
All VDS on nodes with a raid are raised, but it often happens that head movements turn out to be a bottleneck ...
The same information on the disk will be duplicated on EVERY hard drive.
Depending on the type of load, this can be both a plus and a minus.
I remember writing a very long time ago one application solution under Excel. Made on recursive formulas. Six months later, I discovered that Excel has visual BASIC and I completely rewrote the logic on it.
I still remember the result - on one machine, the second solution worked seven times faster, and on another, three times SLOWER . There were different amounts of RAM and different processors. One has more percent, the other has more memory. Why am I? Moreover, this task is not spherical at all. Few data. It may be different.
The only thing that can be said is that four spherical comps will eat more spherical electricity.

Answer 5

You are comparing an airplane and a car. What's faster? Pentium 4 was released a bunch of different models, and even dual-core were. Quads are also very different. It is necessary to look at specific computers for a specific task.

Answer 6

What exactly is a quad? If the Core Quad 9550 with 12 Mb of cache, then it will withstand 2000 online with 100 thousand registered users for sure. A large project weighs on this. True, the pictures are there on the SSD and the external database on the xeons X5620

Answer 7

We also forgot about the cache (size/speed/availability). Probably, the price of one 4-core with a comparable cache will be significant, or there will be no such processor at all.
The speed of the RAM will also be different (the old fours on the old memory).
Parallelization on 4 separate computers how it is supposed to be done? Wouldn't that be the bottleneck? (I am not an expert on this topic, I ask out of curiosity).

Answer 8

Hypothesis in favor of P4.
In a quad, each process will have less memory bandwidth (and probably cache) - 4/X times, where X is the improvement in memory speed in a system on a quad, at peak loads. And in a quad, reaching the peak memory load will happen much faster.