IT staff generally create an inventory of equipment with details about each device in the data center. For servers this has generally included the obvious information such as the vendor, model number, RAM, disk storage and I/O ports. In addition some more detailed information regarding CPU specifics have slowly been added to these notes (kept, all too often, as a spreadsheet). Now there is one more item to add to the list: processor cores.
Another Metric to Track
The processor specific data for each server that is currently tracked commonly includes processor model number, clock speed and maybe even the internal cache size and bus clock speed. These are all quite useful for determining overall performance that can be expected from the server and are essential when planning hardware upgrades or virtualization and server consolidation.