Best (consumer) CPU for Virtualbox?

[Obsoleet]

Looking at waiting for Kaveri or picking up Haswell for a new build. I spend a lot of time in VMs, any advantage of one or the other? No need to mention IPC differences and all that, I realize Haswell is faster from a pure CPU performance standpoint.
I'm looking for differences in VM features like AMD-V, I/O virtualization ect.

The VB FAQ offers little fruit other than 'any recent CPU will do'. My Q9450 has been working fine but VMs have been an increasingly important part of my work, so I'd like to know what consumer CPUs support more VM features.

Also, nothing will be purchased until DDR4 is available with supporting systems. So maybe another year out. I want DDR4 though in my next build, so I'll be waiting till then for either Kaveri (or its successor) or Haswell's successor. I'm big on the idea of APUs, and will only be building APU systems from here on out so best APU matters as well.

Thanks

 

[escrow4]

An i7 4770 non K (must be non K for Vt-D) would be ample and would murder any APU period. The iGPU is sufficient for doing standard display, and I don't think you need the APU's only advantage - the better iGPU. I have no idea why you only want to build APU systems. AMD's CPU's are far behind Intel's and the APU's only make sense in niche applications.

 

[Obsoleet]

The i7 4770 looks good to me. Price is good. I wish it had HD5200 though. That's a real shame. I'm a big fan of the HD5200 stuff and Kaveri+.

Kaveri with DDR4 and Crystalwell-type L4 cache would be my dream CPU. Or, i7 with DDR4 and HD5200.
Either one would be acceptable. But I'd make my final decision based off which CPU supported more virtualization tech.

 

[bononos]

The i7 4770 looks good to me. Price is good. I wish it had HD5200 though. That's a real shame. I'm a big fan of the HD5200 stuff and Kaveri+.

Kaveri with DDR4 and Crystalwell-type L4 cache would be my dream CPU. Or, i7 with DDR4 and HD5200.
Either one would be acceptable. But I'd make my final decision based off which CPU supported more virtualization tech.

Speaking only about Intel, if your vm's are i/o heavy, the overclockable k type cpus like the 4770k do not support vt-d.
Edit- Someone posted earlier than me about it also.

 

[Ferzerp]

Practically nothing uses VT-d...

 

[Torn Mind]

Hex core Haswell-E for $500. More cores to assign to each machine and each core is fast. Beyond Vt-x and AMD-V, I see nothing particularly notable about hardware VM performance support, although this could just be me being ignorant about things I'm not aware of.

 

[Essence_of_War]

Hex core Haswell-E for $500.

IvyB-E, no? (i7-4930k?)

I don't think hexcore hasewll exists yet

 

[Torn Mind]

IvyB-E, no? (i7-4930k?)

I don't think hexcore hasewll exists yet

He said he won't be buying anything until DDR4 is out anyway, and X79 doesn't support DDR4.

 

[Essence_of_War]

Ah, touche sir, reading comprehension fail

 

[Headfoot]

Yeah I don't know what an APU could possibly gain you in terms of any serious usage. Maybe if you budget is tiny. Otherwise if you want real VM hardware, consider whether your application loads need VT-d which allows a guest direct access to devices on PCI without needing the host OS to handle those requests or even have appropriate drivers to do so. If you don't need that then don't worry about VT-d support (for AMD it is AMD-Vi). Realistically if you are waiting for DDR4, definitely do Haswell-E and get the extra cores and huge memory support. Heavy VM usage needs lots of memory first and foremost, and extra cores helps secondarily.

 

[ViRGE]

Practically nothing uses VT-d...

Seeing as this is one area where my knowledge is a bit more limited... Where exactly is VT-d normally used? Bare metal hypervisors?

 

[ShintaiDK]

Seeing as this is one area where my knowledge is a bit more limited... Where exactly is VT-d normally used? Bare metal hypervisors?

Only when you wish to add certain devices directly into your VM. Most hypervisors dont even support VT-D either.

I wonder how many thinks about VT-C, and if they need it

 

[Ferzerp]

Seeing as this is one area where my knowledge is a bit more limited... Where exactly is VT-d normally used? Bare metal hypervisors?

This is all it does:

http://software.intel.com/en-us/blo...tel-virtualization-technology-for-directed-io

Note that the blog is from 2009. No new capability has been added per the most recent whitepapers. There are a few edge cases that might need it, but I've yet to encounter one.

 

[Fox5]

AFAIK, virtualization is one of the areas where AMD is somewhat more competitive. 8 real cores come in handy, and even AMD's cheaper processors tend to have all the virtualization extensions. In the past, AMD's virtualization extensions were much faster than Intel, but I think that gap has been closed. The core 2 cpus are dog slow with virtualization, and even the first gen of core i7's are kind of sluggish.
I wouldn't do Kaveri though, FX's additional cores would likely help more than a small IPC increase.

But yeah, VT-d is something that really only matters if you're playing around with Xen. But it could matter in the future, I'd rather have a feature than not.

It's also easier to get an AMD consumer board that supports ECC if you care about that. But Intel's quad core Haswell Xeons are fairly affordable too if that's what you want.

On the other hand, Intel's Android emulator only supports hardware virtualization on Intel cpus, so that's a fairly major application that AMD doesn't support.

 

[Cerb]

If you're going to mess around with keeping multiple VMs under load, get more cores and more threads. If you're going to use them like having multiple desktop OSes, or just for a little software testing here and there, just get more RAM and a new SSD, not using a Phsion controller.

 

[Obsoleet]

It sounds like no one really knows. I'm leaning towards AMD, possibly the FX due to monster threading capability. To me this is more important than an IPC boost, my games aren't that important or demanding (getting by on a Q9450 without problems to this day).

Attempting to find benchmarks on the subject is difficult but I did find this. http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ubuntu_1204_virt&num=8

It's old but still has interesting information.

- VirtualBox 4.1 on Ubuntu 12.04 when running on the Intel Core i7 3960X "Sandy Bridge Extreme" performed very poorly. VirtualBox was most often running at a small fraction of the speed of the KVM and Xen virtualization methods for the i7-3960X. VirtualBox on the AMD FX-8150 performed much closer to where KVM was running, but still was noticeably behind the popular Kernel-based Virtual Machine. There is some major issue going on with the $1000 USD Intel processor and VirtualBox, possibly similar to the Xen performance issues encountered last year. VirtualBox seemed to do the worst on Intel with multi-threaded workloads.

 

[Headfoot]

It sounds like no one really knows. I'm leaning towards AMD, possibly the FX due to monster threading capability. To me this is more important than an IPC boost, my games aren't that important or demanding (getting by on a Q9450 without problems to this day).

Attempting to find benchmarks on the subject is difficult but I did find this. http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ubuntu_1204_virt&num=8

It's old but still has interesting information.

Wait what?

Yes, people DO know. You need 1) RAM, lots of it. 2) Cores, lots of them 3) IPC, the more the better. In that order.

I'd go x79 with a 6 core Intel CPU, Sandy or Ivy doesn't really matter that much. Whatever gets a better deal. The quad channel memory means you can get more memory with higher bandwidth than other platforms. It will allow you to have double the amount of RAM, which you will run out of quickly as the number of VMs increase.

This is a general rule of thumb. If you know your workload will be CPU heavy then you will for certain want Intel 6 core or even go into higher core count Xeons.
Theoretically you could go AMD if you know your workload is INT heavy and FPU light, otherwise Intel 6 core is going to be more broadly useful.

If you want a 100% certain answer, profile your workload and let us know

 

[Obsoleet]

Wait what?

Yes, people DO know. You need 1) RAM, lots of it. 2) Cores, lots of them 3) IPC, the more the better. In that order.

I'd go x79 with a 6 core Intel CPU, Sandy or Ivy doesn't really matter that much. Whatever gets a better deal. The quad channel memory means you can get more memory with higher bandwidth than other platforms. It will allow you to have double the amount of RAM, which you will run out of quickly as the number of VMs increase.

This is a general rule of thumb. If you know your workload will be CPU heavy then you will for certain want Intel 6 core or even go into higher core count Xeons.
Theoretically you could go AMD if you know your workload is INT heavy and FPU light, otherwise Intel 6 core is going to be more broadly useful.

If you want a 100% certain answer, profile your workload and let us know

I think it was safe to guess that I already that more hardware = better for VMs.. anyone who needs multiple VMs is likely already way ahead of that suggestion. That said, to their credit no one realy suggested such a basic thing besides you. The only hard evidence for VM performance is the link that I posted, which seems to favor AMD's stuff.

 

[Cerb]

It sounds like no one really knows.

More like, "anything is good enough." The feature set is there on every processor you might buy. It's just a question of what level of performance you can take advantage of. Intel's or AMD's virtualization schemes both work about as well as each other, and hypervisors have been optimized pretty well for both. The VirtualBox FAQ, while vague, is also being quite accurate.

You need about as much RAM capacity and bandwidth, CPU performance, disk IO performance, and network IO performance as all the virtuals combined, with a little extra headroom to handle the overhead of virtualizing and sharing of IO. Everything else comes down to the programs you will be running inside the virtual machines, and how they perform.

You are the one that knows best what you're going to do with them.

Due in part to the big caches and no HT for >4 or >6 threads, AMD's are not bad, but Intel keeps improving generation over generation, making it a harder sell. A Xeon E3 can get you 4C8T with 8MB L3 for about Core i5 prices, FI.

Re: VirtualBox: Virtualbox is good for desktops, and provides pretty good responsiveness, and GUI features, like mouse integration, and dynamic USB attachment, but has consistently had performance anomolies. KVM is minimal, and Linux-only. Xen is comparable to VMWare or HyperV.

 

[Fox5]

Hmm, interesting benchmarks with Intel on virtualbox. I use Virtualbox on a Nehalem based Xeon at work, and it does seem significantly slower than my Phenom II based home system.

FYI, Anandtech does test VM performance from time to time. However, very few people test Virtualbox performance, so if that's your VM of choice, no guarantees that other performance tests translate to it.

This link makes it look like 8 core AMD cpus can hang with 6 core Intel cpus in Virtualization. This is Opteron vs Xeon but it's about as good as you'll get I think.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6508/the-new-opteron-6300-finally-tested/4

Anyhow, it looks like virtualization is one of the few areas where AMD punches above their normal weight.
That said, if you're just running one VM, having more cores may not matter all that much.

 

[Accord99]

This link makes it look like 8 core AMD cpus can hang with 6 core Intel cpus in Virtualization. This is Opteron vs Xeon but it's about as good as you'll get I think.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6508/the-new-opteron-6300-finally-tested/4

How so, 32 Bulldozer cores at 2.3 GHz only scores 4% higher than 12 Sandy Bridge cores at 2.2 GHz. The only way an 8 core AMD cpu hangs with 6 core Intels is if they have >2.5x advantage in clock speed.

 

[videogames101]

The Xeon and Opteron lines exists for those who are in your position. I'm assuming this is work related? I'm not sure why you're looking at consumer targeted CPUs.. they aren't targeting you.

 

[Fox5]

How so, 32 Bulldozer cores at 2.3 GHz only scores 4% higher than 12 Sandy Bridge cores at 2.2 GHz. The only way an 8 core AMD cpu hangs with 6 core Intels is if they have >2.5x advantage in clock speed.

Ooops, looks like you're right, there's double the number of cores I thought there were.

 

[Zstream]

Why would you use virtualbox? I'm just asking as that is the really really bad option if you have work VM's. Please use XEN or Hyper-v, something that is at least supported in the Enterprise space and provides you with many more options.

 

[sniffin]

I know a couple of people who run VMs on FX-8350s. At less than $200 a pop they are a pretty good value proposition. Seeing as you're interested in DDR4 though you probably won't ever be considering an FX cpu, or at least an FX as we know it now (large die many cores no igpu).