2 physical Processors or only one with multiple cores?

[Thorsten Hedrich]

Can somebody give me a hint-

what is better / faster in rendering speed:

2 physical processors or, lets say one xeon with 8 cores?

Thanks in advance,

Thorsten

[Roy Hirshkowitz]

Physical cores and physical processors are basically equivalent.  

Intel chips, in particular, make a distinction between logical cores and physical cores.  Logical cores help a little, physical cores help a lot.  So-- for example-- your Xeon might have 4 physical cores with 8 logical cores.  This is a pretty common specification.  Don't pay much attention to the # of logical cores.   As a rule of thumb, use:

(# of physical cores ) x (clock speed) as a rendering speed index.

[George Ioannidis]

2 physical CPUs (let's say two AMD Opterons) with 4 cores each = 8 cores X 17600MHz (2X120=240euros)

1 physical Xeon with 8 cores = 8 cores X say 2400MHZ = 19200MHz (but 1400euros!!!)

The question is also the data throughput between CPU and memory and other significant aspects. Try to investigate some sites with benchmarks (Like Tom's Hardware showing results of rendering benchmarks like Cinebench and others), they are adequate for comparison purposes as regards the nXt.

[Thorsten Hedrich]

Your information helps a lot, thanks!

But as always, Randy Newman is right - it's (always) money that matters... .

Intels pricing is a class of its own.