8350 vs 3770K for vituralization

I currently have a 3570k, which I'm very happy with. But I'm starting to get more into virtual machines, Would it be worth it to upgrade to the 3770k for the hyper threading? or would the 8350's actual 8 cores perform better?

Non issue, 3770k doesn't have kvm extensions, you won't be any better off than with you 3570k.

oh thanks man, dont know why I didn't know that before. Would the 8350 offer any performance over the 3570k?

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/697?vs=701

 

http://www.cpu-world.com/Compare/444/AMD_FX-Series_FX-8350_vs_Intel_Core_i5_i5-3570K.html

With virtualization, an FX-8350 will offer huge performance improvements over an i5-3570k, because the i5 can only do software virtualization, and the FX does hardware virtualization.

The i5 does have VT-x, which are CPU extensions that allow for virtual x86-CPU acceleration in a software virtualization, but it doesn't have VT-d, which is direct hardware access. All AMDs have all virtualization functionality and are all unlocked for easy overclocking.

Many people don't realize what the benefit of hardware virtualization is, and think that it's just a variant of virtualbox, but the difference is huge:

- With virtualbox, a software application will isolate part of the system resources for the guest system, and the CPU of the guest system will be "emulated" on the host system. That makes a software virtualization really slow. For instance, if you have an i5-3570k, you would typically give half of the system RAM and two CPU cores to the Virtualbox, and keep the rest for the host system, so the maximum number of virtualbox appliances at the same time before the system becomes unworkable is 3, with 1 CPU core for each virtualbox appliance and 1 CPU for the host system. Also, the host operating systems don't have access to the USB except by locking out the host OS, and don't have any direct access to the NIC, the SATA controller, the VGA card or the audio card, but the host OS will provide an emulated version (that puts a huge load on the CPU to make that emulation)of these peripherals to the guest OS. By that time, everything is already slow as hell and ridiculously unstable because virtualbox or wmplayer aren't the most polished applications.

- With hardware virtualization, typically in linux via the open source kvm or xen, the guest operating systems have direct access to the hardware, so for instance, on an FX-8350, every guest operating system, however many there are on the host system, will typically be configured to use all the system RAM (virt-manager will typically substract about 500 MB reserved to the host system just to make sure that no performance is lost), so on a system with 8 GB of RAM, every guest operating system will have access to 7.5 GB of RAM, and every guest operating system will have direct access to all 8 CPU cores, and every guest operating system will have direct access to the GPU card, the USB ports, the SATA interface, the NIC, the audio card, etc..., and everything will be very stable.

So you can imagine the huge difference in performance between the two systems, taking hardware virtualization into account.