So I'm working with a dask dataframe. I have 2 computers at work... A laptop and virtual machine.

Laptop specs:
Windows 7 Professional
8 core i7 4710MQ @ 2.5 GHz
16 GB of RAM
500 GB HDD.

Virtual Machine Specs
Windows Server 2012R2
8 core Xeon E5-2609 v3 @1.9 GHz
32 GB of RAM
500 GB SSD

I'm noticing that the speeds of working with dask dataframe are much, much better on the i7 laptop than on the virtual machine. I have some code that runs in about 40 seconds on the laptop at 115 seconds on the virtual machine.

I talked to my IT department and they offered to add more cores. (Who am I to say no?) But I'm wondering if there is something about the i7 processor vs. Xeon that would make it nearly 3 times faster?

The operations I'm doing in dask are very math-heavy. Lots of groupby().sum() and elementwise stuff.

Thoughts on this?