I often wondered what's the general purpose of that option.
As I only have 1 - 2 socket servers, I always choose 1 socket with x cores (mostly 2 - 8, not exeeding 1 real CPU).
Also for historic reasons: Sockets have been limited, but not cores.
Does it generally make any difference on Xen side/backend?
VM OS might handle it different due to NUMA optimizations.