For any application that can take advantage of more than a single socket and core...
Well, its not like everyone runs a single application at a time nowadays. It wouldn't be strange to have a couple VMs running, your favorite IDE and maybe some other tool running at the same time while you're testing something, specially if you do web stuff, you also need to have a DB engine running just in case.
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For any application that can take advantage of more than a single socket and core...
Well, its not like everyone runs a single application at a time nowadays. It wouldn't be strange to have a couple VMs running, your favorite IDE and maybe some other tool running at the same time while you're testing something, specially if you do web stuff, you also need to have a DB engine running just in case.
Depends on what you're doing with your VMs, but very probably you're talking about more of a memory footprint than a CPU load. Same thing for a DBM and often the IDE too. Doubling the number of cores in a system that isn't already under-load is just going to increase the number of cycles you spend spinning idle, which very likely is already where most of your cycles go on a desktop.
That, and multi-socket mobos tend to individually be substantially more expensive than single-socket mobos, and also lock you into using server-class cpus and memory, all of which come at a premium compared to their consumer-grade counterparts, and you end up with a fair bit less bang for your buck. Also, everything you described is perfectly fine to run on a separate machine. If I'm running a "couple" of VMs and a DB, I'd rather build a pair of machines, use one, and stick the VMs and DB on the other.
Also, how many VMs do you use? I really never use more than 1 at a time, and even that sits idle 99.5% of the time because all I'm using is a linux VM on a windows host for the purposes of interacting with linux servers. Large numbers of VMs running simultaneously doesn't make a whole lot of sense unless you're talking about server-farms that need the isolation for client security reasons, and VM checkpointing & migration for efficiency.
