Last week I worked with a client that wants to continue running their mission critical Point of Sales system on a server first procured in 2006 for another two years. I had a catch up with a non-technical project manager who seemed to think that server compute power wasn’t an issue because the processors ran at > 2Ghz and new servers are still the same. So as well as giving all the usual reasons why that’s a bad idea to keep running mission critical systems on unsupported 8 year old servers, I also emphasised how slow their server was by comparing its compute power to modern processors and even smartphones.

This is something I repeatedly come across, people know their hardware is old but don’t appreciate how much compute power and server capacity has improved. The Geekbench Browser (a cross platform benchmarking tool) lets you compare apples to oranges: http://browser.primatelabs.com

From the examples below you can see that a modern dual core laptop processor is more than twice as powerful as a dual core server processor from 2006; and a modern server processor (which has double the number of cores) is more than 5 x more powerful. Finally we have the latest iPhone which we can see scores a bit higher than a server processor from 2006.

There is obviously a variety of reasons why even an old server is a better database platform than an iPhone but the comparison served a useful purpose.

Single dual core server processor from 2006:

Single laptop dual core processor from 2013:

Single quad core server processor from 2013:

iPhone 6: