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I'm aware that processor clock speed can be misleading, and these days power scales with parallel execution and cores.

That said, how do I figure out which of today's standard x86-64 consumer/server processors would be the fastest for single threaded calculations? (I use mainly C and JVM)

I've already got access to loads of cores of modest speed, but sometimes need fast single threaded operations, so wondering what would be the most suitable thing to buy

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Depends on the type of calculations you're doing. – Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams Nov 29 '10 at 9:57
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Sites like tomshardware have pretty good comparison charts to compare components so that might be worth a look. – DJ Pon3 Nov 29 '10 at 9:59
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migrated from serverfault.com Nov 29 '10 at 10:59

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closed as off topic by Sathya♦, random♦ Nov 29 '10 at 19:13

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2 Answers

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What instruction set? x86/64? Power? Cell?

If you mean x86/64 then the chip with the highest clock speed is the Xeon X5677 (QC, 3.47Ghz) with the X5687 (QC, 3.6 Ghz) available shortly.

That said the way to get faster is via overclocking and Xeon's aren't often overclocked as they're focussed on stability, plus most overclockers find the i7's the best for that job. If you choose to go that way then the i7-980X is the fastest today (6C, 3.33Ghz) with the i7-995X (QC, 3.6Ghz) also available shortly. The 980X has been overclocked to 5Ghz with liquid nitrogen.

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Also, that Xeon should support Turbo Boost so should see at least +266 MHz during single-threaded load, passing the 3,8 GHz barrier without overlocking ^^ – Oskar Duveborn Nov 29 '10 at 10:58
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Not really an answer to your question, but perhaps this site can be useful: http://www.spec.org/benchmarks.html#cpu It has tons of results for all kind of cpu-s, only problem is searching through them.

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Would vote this up, but my reputation is insufficient. – Pengin Nov 29 '10 at 11:23
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