[Discuss] best dual core Linux box

[feenberg at nber.org (Daniel Feenberg)]

We are in the midst of licensing the SAS software product for a server. 
This is an extremely expensive product, and the charge for a quad-core 
machine is tens of thousands of dollars more than for a dual-core machine. 
If you are unfamiliar with SAS, it does lots of sequential I/O and is 
rarely CPU bound. So we are looking to put together a high performance 
machine that uses only a dual-core processor. I know that dual-core is now 
usually very low-end (or laptop) but creative suggestions are welcome. 
Ideally we would like PCI-e slots for SAS or SATA controllers so that we 
can have a lot of fast local storage.

Daniel Feenberg
NBER