Thanks for including me in your roundup of resources. I love your phrasing about “conquering the 900-pound gorilla” — social media is a fascinating phenomenon. The tools du jour change so quickly that it’s easy to mistake the trees for the forest.

To approach the speed of 2.8GHz Pentium4 (PentiumD is dual core Pentium4) you should get around 1.86GHz of Core2-based CPU or over 2,0GHz of Athlon64-based CPU. That is Core2 Duo E6400 2,13GHz often outperforms AthlonX2-4400 and sometimes even X2-4600+ which run at ~2.2-2.3GHz. And that Core2 can be overclocked to 3.2GHz using intel stock cooler and modern Intel-P35 based motherboard and no overvoltage, giving you 6.4GHz of Core2-based power, comparable to some 10GHz of Pentium-4-based CPU’s. Add $160 - and you have a beast with 8GB of DDR2-800 RAM (just never-ever overclock RAM unless you really know what you are doing), capable of running unimaginable before amount of tasks. Provided you have the right 64bit OS and a good BIOS version (the wrong will make you MAD because of strange issues you’ll run into when you have over 3GB of ram). The “right” one for me is FreeBSD-8.0-current/amd64, typically running 4,000-5,000 processes (7.0-release has problems with schedulers for SMP, both of them; Linux has lots of schedulers but it’s hard to decide which is good for your needs).
I never before ran over 600-800 on AMD Barton-3000 or Athlon-64-3000 with 1GB. So that is a great saving - like 5-6 servers were put into just one, saving lots of administration efforts, and needless to say that it uses a place of one and takes way less power. And it didn’t cost an arm and a leg.

The only thing I don’t like in Layeredtech is they don’t really make a difference between “reliable high-end hardware, with ECC and so on” and consumer-grade hardware, that costs way less (unless it’s scsi drives).
Years ago 1 gig of ram (DDR-333/DDR-400) costed $100. At LT it costed $25/month. Now 1Gig DDR2-800 costs $20, and still LT charges $25/month. I do understand if such sum is charged for fancy “FB-DIMM ECC”, “anything else with ECC” as they cost just around that $100/1GB but fail to understand whythings that are cheaper don’t get cheaper.
Another similiar problem is why dual core server with 2GB of ram and 4 drives costs exactly the price of 2 single-core servers with 1GB ram and 2 drives each.
Something MUST be changed in the heads of managers before it’s too late.

Billy:
Modern dual(quad)-processor motherboards are supposed to host two(four) of dual or quad-core processors. But you should keep in mind that even high-end Intel chipsets don’t provide enough memory bandwidth for that setups, making it a major bottleneck for 8 or 16-core servers. So it really depends on tasks that you are using the server for - if it’s plain computing, like encryption or similiar that can run in parallel - you may get 16x speed increase with 16 cores, otherwise don’t go over two or quad cores. With consumer-grade hardwareyou’ll not go over 4 cores anyway ;).

In short Intel’s Core2-based dual core CPU’s are a win against dual-processor setups because of unified shared cache between both processors (so that even for single task you may get a benefit from that fact alone), it doesn’t take that much overhead to switch process from one core to another (that’s where dual processor setups are weak), they are more reliable by design - the motherboard is much less complicated
and there is no such thing as “inter-processor communication issues” that don’t add anything good to reliability of the product.

If you need something for a single appliance to just pound for a while, then go with the dual core, if you need something to run multiple appliances over time, then go with a dual proc.

Make sure if you want to compare processors then be sure to compare all aspects. 3.0 to 3.0 for example. You didn’t specify the speed of the dual proc.

Thank you for the insight. Personal experience always helps in a discussion, and please keep the comments coming.

In my country Pentium D is cheaper than Pentium Dual core.
Also, Looks like Pentium D is not longer available.

In sumary, I have the impression that Pentium D is much better than Dual Cores.

Doing same activities, Pentium D always has better performance than those Dual Cores with 2Gb ram.