QuadCore/DualCore differences to modperl/Apache/mySQL

["Will Fould" <suppressed>]

Hello

A lot of hype has surrounded quad core vs dual core processors.

We're buying a handful of new machines and I'm trying to make the best weighted decision for our budget.

My very brief research indicates that ironically, a slightly faster dual core (for example, a recent Opteron 22xx processor), would likely be better off on a heavily loaded webserver with decent RAM, than a similar or slighly slower clocked quad core processor since it's unlikely that we'll be taking advantage of any differences between them. The thought we have now is to buy 2 dual cores instead of 1 or 2 quad cores for each server. In general, we spend a lot of time doing database lookups and page formation. We'll also be running memcached on at least some of these machines.

Might this generally true (or true-enough) for other apache/modperl/DBI-based web applications?  If not, what else might I consider to be significant factors?

If someone has a suggested configuration, that would be nice to hear about too.

Thanks in advance!