Xeon vs. Opteron

Rob Williams

Editor-in-Chief
Staff member
Moderator
AMD's Opterons have enjoyed a lead in performance in the server market for the past few years due to their superior architecture resulting in better performance and lower power consumption (higher performance per watt). Learning from its mistakes and realizing that the current design could not compete with the mighty Opteron, Intel has introduced a completely new Xeon processor, based on its Core 2 microarchitecture.

Toms just published a new article compared the top end Woodcrest, Dempsey and Italy processors to one another, and it's no surprise what came out on top.

I am unsure why they chose a 940 Opteron instead of an AM2, but it likely would have only made a true difference in the memory benchmarks. Even as it stands, the Opteron had FAR lower memory latency and faster bandwidth than the Xeons. Despite that fact, the Woodcrest kicked the Netburst and Opterons asses... bad.

I don't think it's a surprise that a Core based Xeon won all of the rounds (well almost all), but the fact that all of these are priced similarly, it's not a hard decision. Because the Core based Xeon uses -way- less power than Netburst, that would be something else to save money in the long run...

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Greg King

I just kinda show up...
Staff member
Good read. I love articles like that. It's nice to have that access to such top end hardware and for those in the IT field, it's certainly something to think about.
 
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