Does's CPU process could determine the speed potential of application

I have two hardware. One is sitting in the front, receving user's input(Server A), the other is backend with database (Server B). Both Server using Java and multi processors. Server A talk to Server B by some proprietary protocol. When I do performance teseting, I notice server A's CPU consumption is not as big as server B (Java process with DB). Can I make decision that Server A is faster than server B? Or Server has m开发者_运维百科ore potential to run faster than server B. In the other ways, what's the relation between CPU load/consumption percentage with application speed?

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If the two machines are running different software then the CPU usage tells you nothing.

Measuring software performance is hard. You can't look at simple numbers like CPU usage. You also need to look at disk usage, network I/O, memory consumption and a whole range of other factors. Maybe machine A is I/O bound, or maybe it's waiting for machine B to respond to a request, or maybe it really is a faster machine.