CPU is niet het probleem, lijkt me voldoende, minecraft gebruikt veel RAM en het liefste een snelle SSD. Of zelfs ramdisk. Snelle google:
networking: 250 kilobits per second AVERAGE. It bursts up a lot higher than that; you can't host 40 people off 10 megabits, but if you host them off 100 megabits, you'll find your total usage to be around 10. Also, due to the way the TCP steams work, they seem to be prone to overflowing the TCP buffers. If your driver or OS supports it, consider upping these buffers.
memory: 75-100 megs per person; if you want the usage to ever go down, please adjust the memory flags (ie don't have -Xmx1024M -Xms1024M and then complain that the memory usage stays at 1 gig, because Xms sets the minimum). On the other hand, if minecraft is the only thing going to be using the memory, stick Xms and Xmx the same; there's no point spending CPU cycles recovering memory until you need to.
I/O: one of the biggest issues with minecraft is the squillions of small files mean the disk is working back-and-forth. Large drives, "green" drives, or cheap drives tend to have slower-turning disks. This doesn't affect throughput (the larger drives are denser, so a slower spin still reads more information), but DOES affect seek time. Use 7200rpm drives instead of 5400 if you get the chance; 10,000rpm or SSDs would of course be better still. On linux, use the -noatime or -relative mount flags to disable writing "last access time" data every time a file is read; on windows, this is disabled by default on newer OSs (but not XP or server 2003). To check this on windows, do:
fsutil behavior query disablelastaccess
If this is 0 or "disablelastaccess is not currently set", do:
fsutil behavior set disablelastaccess 1
and reboot.
The best solution would be to run the world off a RAMdrive, and back it up to disk occasionally. This will of course require more RAM.
CPU: Generally speaking, if your server has enough RAM, it should have enough CPU to deal with things. I can't be more specific because, from my point of view, CPU has NEVER been an issue.