You should consider whether your workload is CPU-bound when upgrading current hardware or purchasing new hardware.

You can identify a CPU-bound workload by checking the CPU utilization, but instead of looking only at how heavily your CPUs are loaded overall, look at the balance of CPU usage and I/O for your most important queries, and notice whether the CPUs are loaded evenly. You can use the tools discussed later in this chapter to figure out what limits your server’s performance.