VMWare Processor/Core Configuration

A lot of what I’ve read about configuring the “number of processors” and “number of cores per processor” in a VMWare guest indicates that the performance will be the same whether you choose:

a) Four processors with two cores each (eight total cores)
b) Two processors with four cores each (also eight total cores)

Recently someone suggested that my Ignition gateway might perform better with the guest configured for fewer processors with a larger number of cores (example ‘b’ above). Does anyone have real-world experience with this? Can it make a significant difference in a very resource-intensive application?