Questions[intel](server)

1. Many web hosting companies are now offering Intel Core i3/i5/i7 processors under "cheap dedicated hosting." But my laptop has an Intel core i3 processor, which makes it more likely a desktop processor than a server processor.

2. When I spoke to one of the web hosting company's tech support official about this, he told me that their "i3 processor comes bundled with ECC/Registered DDR3 RAM on a server-class motherboard (socket LGA1156)." Furthermore he told me this:

"We've chosen to offer this particular CPU as our "budget" server, but in no way lowers the quality of the actual server itself. We utilize proper cooling methods and also the same fans and heatsinks that we use on our Xeon CPU's.

The main difference between the Xeon and these i3' are that the Xeon processors can support multiple CPU's on the same motherboard, while these cannot. They're also marketed to be server CPU's, while the i3's are not, but they perform just as well under the same conditions."

I would like to take any input I get from the community. Is it good to go with an i3/i5/i7 processor, with the kind of setup mentioned above? or is there anything I should be worried about?

EDIT: To be more clear, I've got an Intel Core i3-540 Dual-Core processor (3.06GHz) with HyperThreading. And I will be running a wordpress blog on it (generates some 1-1.5 million pageviews a month).

All our old servers have supermicro boards and we used IPMI to make out-of-band managment. Mostly we used it for shutdown/restart and sometimes change some settings via the sol/kvm console. As it happens one of our new servers has an Intel board with vPro/AMT. We enabled it and were really disappointed from the webgui it offers, which is very limited compared to our usual IMPI soliution.

Our main problem is now: How can we enable the +#?=)(&/%$§" kvm vnc. AMT supports it from version 6, we have 7. We activated in the bios settings kvm, SOL, and IDER. But there seems no vnc server to run (an easy telnet servername 5900 shows this). Some digging on the really spare sites on the all-knowing internet seem to indicate that you have to enable it in addition to the BIOS setting with a Managability Tool from Intel. (Not sure why it is this way, and there is not a BIOS option for it) - but if it is so, we dont know how to do it, as we have a Unix (Linux + Solaris) only environment and dont can use it (its a windows tool).

It seems there are driver for Linux from Intel that you can make those seetings not via network but direct on the host - but guess what? We want that console to install a system on it, so we have no system at all on the machine itself.

Anybody knows of any solution for this? We already installed on our other machines the amttools but give just a SOL terminal (which shows NOT the BIOS messages) and mirrors the functionality of the very limited webgui.

Update: As solution we used now a private laptop with windows. We installed this SOAP messages generating batch scripts from Intel on it and activated it once. So we have now working vnc - but I would gladly hear another solution, as (we already checked it) when the AMT is (partially) reseted the setting is also gone.

I ordered some new PCs with Intel vPro enabled on them, but now that I have them I'm not sure how to use it.

I found some old websites about using Altiris and Microsoft SMS but those are expensive and really meant for large organizations. Does anyone know of a free or cheap way to use vPro?

Is there a nice way to monitor and/or control Intel Turbo Boost technology on Nehalem processors from a Linux host? I'm looking to do this RHEL/CentOS 5.5 hosts running stock or Realtime MRG kernels.

Has anyone here found a good way to leverage Turbo Boost in your environments?

For an Intel based system keeping the number of cores constant how much difference would there be between two dual core processors and one quad core processor? We run Oracle OLTP databases on two dual core processors. With fewer dual core processors available we may need to switch to quad core, but we are limited to four cores due to licensing issues, so will have to switch to one processor. If we make the switch should I expect to see a change in real world processing speed?