??? AMD or Intel for number crunching???

I am again curious about benchmarking for scientific number crunching on AMD and Intel, respectively. Most of these kinds of requests on this site are followed up by intense debates among a core of people who probably know a lot about AMD/Intel systems, but I don't feel like I'm getting the bottom line as far as number crunching is concerned.

SO... I'm looking to find the best system for my university lab. The main purpose of this machine is to crunch numbers through matlab, C or Fortran. As far as I understand I have the following options:

1. Intel dual 2.0GHz Xeon / 2GB dual channel RDRAM / 120GB 8MB cache IBM HD.

2. AMD dual MP2000+ / 2GB dual channel DDR 2700 / same HD.

I don't know what mobo to get, but have been recommended the P4DCE+ i860 with the i860 chipset for the Intel system. As far as the AMD system is concerned; I don't know.

Price is an important factor, but performance in pure number crunching is the main purpose of this machine. I'm not interested in overclocking, as I don't want to jeopardize any warranty issues that it might interfere with.

Some issues that I'm interested in are: Hyperthreading, bus speeds, direct CPU to memory channels (?), etc.

Does anybody have links to benchmark tests that investigate this kind of performance? I'm not interested in graphics / game / mpeg-encoding and the usual benchmarking results. Anyone? AMD or Intel?

My friend found this link:

http://www.vanshardware.com/review [...] 2000_2.htm

Very interesting results here. Clincher:

floating point unit: (higher is better)
Xeon 2GHz 1041
Athlon 2000+XP 2321

Science Mark (higher is better):
Xeon 2GHz 120.53
Athlon 2000+XP 153.13

Seems like Athlon is the way to go.

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whats your budget?
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Well, we already have the HD, and the budget is about US$3000.
We need a 100mb/s ethernet card, a DVD (instead of CD), an 8MB videocard, no monitor (want headless system, but possibility to hook a monitor up for administration if necessary) and... well, the usual suspects.

The dual amd system is a better system, even though vans is a biased website, those benchmarks fit with what I have seen at other websites.

PS: Fugger is a listed troll, and I would be sure to get links to whatever information he gives you, he has been known to lie in the past.

The Cash Left In My Pocket,The BEST Benchmark

I have now read numerous benchmarking tests on pure number crunching, and believe that an AMD system will do the job much faster, all test results are between 20-100% faster on the dual AMD vs. the dual P4 Xeon.

I have also checked for cost of these two systems and found the following (in CAD):
1. INTEL:
2*P4-2.0GHz Xeon = 2*720 = $1440
4*512MB ECC, Reg. RDRAM = 4*380 = $1520
MB Supermicro P4DCE+ = $690
add HD, keyboard, ethernet card, box, floppy, DVD and Video at ~$600 and get...
CAD $4250 + taxes.

2. AMD:
2*MP2000+ = 2*445 = $890
4*512MB ECC, Reg. DDR 266 = 4*270 = $1080
MB Tyan S2466N= $380
add HD, keyboard, ethernet card, box, floppy, DVD and Video at ~$600 and get...
CAD $2950 + taxes.

It seems that the Intel option is about 45% more expensive for less performance. AMD it is. Thanks, people, for input!