http://it.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=3567&p=12

The results are pretty conlusive here. Especially with the price drops on DDR3 and X58, it doesn’t make sense to get anything else by now.

Anandtech just posted an article pitting the latest Phenom II 955 against the i7. Go check out the article as I think you will all find it interesting. See the conclusion:

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=3551&p=16

As I said earlier in this post and Anand essentially saying the same thing– The price difference is now basically negligible. At this point, if you are looking to build a box for VMs, I’d go with i7.

I saw this and figured that I’d pass the info along. If price is the primary factor for you, this may just make your decision for you:

MicroCenter currently has an i7 920 for $200:

http://www.microcenter.com/single_product_results.phtml?product_id=0300438

DDR3 prices have dropped like a rock too – just a few days ago, 6GB of OCZ DDR3 was available for $60 – that’s $120 for 12GB of DDR3.

The price discrepancy between the two platforms disappeared so fast since I first posted this, I think the choice is getting pretty obvious…

Sorry about the lack of updates. Work has been hectic so I haven’t had a chance to play with the toys

In any case, I should have some time this weekend to throw either Hyper-V or ESXi under the AMD box. If you had to choose one environment for me to run comparison with, which one would you go? Judging from your choice of Xen, you are probably leaning more toward either ESXi or Xen, eh?

Thanks,
Jerret

At this point, if best value is of concern, AMD’s Dragon is hard to beat – especially considering that the 940 can be had for $190 here in the states. A good 790GX can be found for ~$120 and 8GB of DDR2 is dirt cheap. Though DDR3 prices are rapidly dropping (I just picked up another 6GB of DDR3 for $60 AR), finding the i7 chip or board on sale is still somewhat harder.

If you are looking to buy right now, I’d personally rather pick up 3 Dragons vs 2 i7’s for the same money. But if the purse string isn’t so tight for you , i7 sure is pretty darn sweet.

For virtualization, don’t expect HT to help you much — I find that virtual SMP is just a gimmick and that best performance is with 1 core assigned per VM, like this IEEE article synopsis also concluded:

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=1419852

I am planning to set up a box at home to play with a few WebSphere Application Server instances, MQ, Oracle — this kind of stuff. I’m still ruminating about running it in VMs (using ESX or Xen), because I like the possibility of creating and saving multiple configurations of the products or duplicating client’s environment for testing purposes.

I’ve been using virtualization only for running Windows applications while working on Linux so far, so I have no working knowledge of how multiple VMs behave: which components make bottlenecks, whether they take advantage of i7’s hyperthreading and so on. Thus, your experiences are very valuable for me.

Since I’m building the whole box from scratch, I’ve got pretty much options which platform to choose, which of course is good, but also leads to confusion. Intel i7 is my favourite so far, as it seems to be a solid base for further upgrade (with Intel’s plan for 6-core units for the same socket and AMD’s strategy that I don’t really follow ).

Sorry about the lack of updates, but I’ve been a bit busy.

I haven’t completed setting up the AMD box yet (They’re still in boxes!!! ), but I’ve been testing the i7 setup and I can say that I am quite impressed. For general productivity and Office/Web/Dev work, off of the seat of my pants I can’t really tell the speed difference between the i7 @ 3.6ghz and my older Q6600 @ 3.6ghz. Number Crushing/Compiling wise though, I am sure you can shave off a few seconds here and there if you are constantly compiling large projects.

For running multiple VM’s, both are very adequate under Hyper-V and ESXi. I’ve noticed that regardless of which of these platforms I run, my bottleneck seems to be with disc throughput and not really with processing power- but I guess this depends on the duty you’ve assigned the VM’s. The extra 4GB available on the i7 platform doesn’t hurt either if you are running big DB’s or if you want to cram more VM’s onto the physical box. The largest perceivable difference is when you cram too many VM’s onto the Q6600 box – the extra 4GB of RAM on the i7 allows for more stretch room if you are running anything more than 4-5 instances.

What kind of Dev environment are you looking to build?

I will throw together the PhenomII box soon, I promise.