Choosing the right type of microprocessor, or CPU, for servers can sometimes be a headache. Over the last few years we've seen a shift of focus in the market from pure clock frequency to more complex CPU architectures and number of cores.

WebDeal will normally recommend choosing an x86-64 architecture from Intel or AMD, and alternatively a PowerPC CPU architecture from IBM. Only these two architectures will be covered in this overview.

x86-64 architecture

It's difficult to define a standard within CPU architectures, but x86-64 is the most widely used type of CPU. x86-64 processors are produced by both Intel and AMD and are supported by all the main operating systems, such as Windows and Linux.

The trend within x86-64 CPUs goes in the direction of multi-core designs. In simple terms, this means that if you previously could do only one thing at a time with a single-core CPU, you can now do two things at a time with a dual-core CPU (or four things at a time with a quad-core CPU). With the arrival of multi-core designs, clock frequency is no longer being increased for the purpuse of increasing performance. On the contrary, there have been reductions to clock frequency in order to bring down power consumption and overheating.

WebDeal recommends choosing multi-core processors, since they allow many users to connect to a site simultaneously and have independent threads of execution. This gives Web servers and application servers a much better throughput.

IBM Power architecture
The IBM Power architecture is similar to the one used on the fastest supercomputers, and most mission-critical systems have therefore been using it for years. Digging deeper into the IBM Power architecture is not an easy task, but from an overall perspective, there are mainly two reasons why we should look at it:

• Hardware virtualisation features are far better than in any other CPU architecture
• It can handle heavy workload better than the x86-64
• A very low MTBF (Mean time between failures)
• Fully Open Standard used, also at hardware level

Besides the technical advantages mentioned above, this type of architecture is also convenient for users of softwares that require licensing per CPU.

For instance, you can buy a Standard Edition license of Oracle's database server and utilise up to 16 IBM Power CPU cores on just one single CPU license.
Please contact us and get to know more about the technical advantages of an IBM Power-based hosting environment.