A client came to us needing more CPU speed than their older E3-1275v6 dedicated servers could provide. Their workload was PHP and WordPress, which is mostly single-threaded: each page request runs on one CPU core. More cores wouldn’t help; they needed faster cores.
What we built
We recommended Intel Xeon Gold 6244 processors: 8 cores per CPU at high clock frequency. We built custom dedicated servers on Supermicro hardware with:
- Dual Xeon Gold 6244 (16 cores per server, high frequency)
- Samsung NVMe drives in RAID for fast I/O
- DDR4 RAM
- Dual 40 Gbps NICs (80 Gbps total on the private network)
The client ran Kubernetes across 12 of these dedicated servers to distribute their single-threaded PHP workload across all available cores. Each request gets a fast core, and Kubernetes handles load balancing.
Why high-frequency matters
Not all workloads benefit from more cores. PHP, WordPress, and many web applications process one request per thread. A server with 64 slow cores will handle each request slowly. A server with 16 fast cores handles fewer requests concurrently but each one finishes much faster. For web serving, faster individual requests mean better user experience and lower time-to-first-byte.
High-frequency options
If you need high-frequency CPU for your workload, we offer it on both dedicated servers and VPS hosting. Our Gen 4 virtual servers run on Intel Xeon Gold at 3.5 GHz. For dedicated hardware, contact us for a custom quote.