Duel of the Titans: Opteron vs. Xeon

Hammer Time: AMD On The Attack

The mood in our labs was thick with excitement - there was barely a week to perform detailed tests on a total of four platforms. AMD had sent in a server with Dual Opteron processors for testing with little time to spare before launch. And it quickly became clear who its rival would be: an Intel Dual Xeon, the 3 GHz version. This article describes the results from our duelling test systems.

We had to take an entirely new approach to test the 64 bit architecture of the Opteron both as a server and as a workstation. We used the brand new Suse Linux Enterprise Server 8 (SLES) with its latest kernel 2.4.19. A total of 30 server and workstation benchmarks were used in this review to fathom the performance of AMD's new Opteron processor.

Opteron the Great: the new CPU is fitted into a package that's similar to that of the Intel Pentium 4, with the exception that AMD decided to use ceramic.