In reply to Marc Masuno.

Xeon E5v2 (ivy bridge) is the latest and greatest for servers. If I understand your question right: building up a system on latest gen desktop reference architecture to run ESX and how that might compare to a sever platform on previous generation processor... not certain. I'd have to dig to see how the memory controllers are configured on each because that's the major lever for virtualization. The server platform is likely going to outperform even between generations because more memory controllers are typically available vs. the desktop/notebook implementations.