Intel Xeon and AMD Opteron Battle Head to Head

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.

If you are in the market for a new high-end server solution, you will want to check this out. In one corner are the Dempsey and Woodcrest Xeons, the latter based on the Core technology. Toms did not have an AM2 based Opteron on hand, so they stuck to Italy, the 940 version. Woodcrest stole the show here, beating the others in all of the benchmarks, and despite that fact, it uses way less power.