(to skip the details, jump to last paragraph)A few months ago I built what I thought was a beefed up box with an AMD Phenom II X4 955, 8 GB DDR3 1333 mHz RAM plus a nice motherboard (can't remember exact specs). However I couldn't get a VirtualBox Windows XP guest machine to perform well in it, and later read that AMD CPUs don't work so well in general (???).Anyway, I have been asked to configure and buy a new notebook for a family member, who needs to run a few legacy Windows apps but really wants to use Ubuntu as the main OS to try to squeeze good multimedia performance out of it. Right now I am looking at AVADirect Clevo W860CU with NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460M, 8 GB DDR3 1333mHz RAM, and a 7200-rpm hard drive.Due to past experience, I am not confident about virtualisation. One question is: Would a quad core i7 (say 840QM) with slower clockspeed perform better (or worse) than a dual core i7 (say 620M) with higher clockspeed for virtualised guests under Linux? Or should I just tell the person to go with a different host OS?
Linux as virtualisation host and client performance under Core i7?
ubuntu;virtual machine;windows
This mainly depends on which software is run under Windows. VirtualBox can offer all cores to Windows, but if the applications run there only use one or two, this is of no help and the higher clocked dual-core might be faster. (If it is really faster clocked than the quad core running turbo boost)