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How Many CPUs for Microsoft's SQL Server?
adrian asks: "I've been wrestling with this problem some time now. I'm looking to buy a new machine to act as a SQL server. Unfortunately, we have to use M$ SQL Server 2000 and the per CPU unlimited licensing is very expensive. My question is this: Is there a benefit to running 4 slower CPUs as opposed to running 2 faster CPUs on a MS SQL box? I've found some people seem to think having more processors is better for SQL server... But, getting only two CPUs is certainly cheaper for licensing. Will performance suffer even if the two CPUs are faster? I've searched high and low using google and have yet to find any good hard numbers or benchmarks. Take these machines as an example: A quad PIII Xeon 550Mhz/512k cache box versus a dual P4 Xeon 2Ghz/512k cache box. The P4 machine would be more expensive, but we would save about $10,000 on licensing. And I know a 2Ghz P4 wouldn't be as fast as a 2Ghz PIII (if it existed) but yet I still want to think the dual P4 rig would be faster. The machines I am looking at are both IBM boxes with the same RAID and disk configs, 4 gigs of RAM, etc. Maybe some Slashdot. readers, who have experience with similar situations, could shed some light on this topic?"