Core i7 980X is love.

CChN

I have 12 CPUs (6 physical cores, 6 virtual). How many virtual routing instances in GNS3 do you think I can pull with this thing?!?!?!?!?!?!?!

I remember reading a forum post about having to manually configure GNS3 so that each process will get distributed across the processors evenly.

Has anyone stress tested a 12-core system before?

tiersten

Its a 6 core CPU. The virtual CPUs are made by using HT and Dynamips doesn't generate the correct type of load for HT to work well since it'd be running a similar instruction mix on all cores.

You get benefits from HT if you've got some processes that are tying up this set of execution units whilst you've got other processes that want to use a different set of execution units. If everything wants to use the same execution units then you gain nothing and could possibly go slower due to extra HT overhead.

Your limit is most probably going to be memory instead of CPU.