Troy Dawson said...

|It really comes down to your application.  If possible, try it on two 
|comparable CPU setups, one AMD and one Intel.  I've seen some wildly lopsided 
|tests, try to at least give them the same amount of memory and the same disks.
|Then run your application on it, and see which is faster.
|
|That's how I decided I like the Opteron.  On my tests (recompiling rpm's) the 
|Opteron beat the Xeon.  But I saw other people with the exact same setup, and 
|for them the Xeon beat the Opteron.  It all came down to the application.

And that can change over time.  For years
we bought only AMD-based systems, because
most of our apps consistently ran better
on them.  Then we found a couple that were
decidely better on INtel.  When we tested
equivalent servers for the last set of
compute farm systems, Intel won hands down.

-Miles