New Xeons Dual CPU vs Single CPU with high core count

[GTMan25]

With Intel offering CPUs that include up to 18 cores, is it easier to justify ignoring dual cpu options? In particular the new Xeon W-2145 has 8 cores and 16 threads and still turbos up to 4.5GHz for single threaded tasks.

It is nice to offer all options but sometimes there are practical limits. We can't choose both a Lenovo P520 and a P720, if we chose the P720 because a few people want the dual CPU then we have to skimp elsewhere, so perhaps the P520 with a single CPU is the better option if the people who demand dual CPUs could be satisfied with an 8-core single CPU?

 

[Eximo]

That is tricky. At our company we offer Dell Precision workstations, a few models due to how quickly they are discontinued, but essentially they are all the same platform.

A dual socket motherboard. A 1300W power supply (super overkill). However, most of them only have a single CPU installed, and it is an 8-core high frequency chip. Some are X99 and some X299 at this point. (I believe the older ones boost to 4.1 on a single core, but 3.9 across all cores) 64GB of memory and a nice Quadro. The engineers that need high core count have dual 12 core CPUs and 128GB of memory. I've not seen one of our new models in the field, so not quite sure what they have now, but I would guess it is similar.

Basically we keep the dual CPU option, but don't take advantage of it unless we have to.

If you have to pick one over the other, I would go single socket these days. However, you never know what future needs will be, so maybe pick up a few dual socket systems just in case.

 

[GTMan25]

Thanks for the feedback. I've been trying to find a test of one 8-core CPU vs two 4-core CPUs, but these large core count machines are so new I don't think anyone has done this.