Intel Xeon and AMD Opteron Battle Head to Head

Benchmark Results

Video

Video encoding is a computationally intensive task. From these results, we can see that the Opteron 285 is no match for the Xeon 5160, being outperformed by a margin of 20-30%. This significantly superior performance is due to the Single Cycle SSE unit in the Core 2 microarchitecture, which results in vastly superior media encoding. In these benchmarks the Opteron is even slightly slower than the Xeon 5080.

Audio

In our audio encoding benchmarks we can again see that the Xeon 5160 significantly outperforms the Opteron 285, by a margin of 30-35%; in this benchmark, however, the Opteron is able to attain better results than the Xeon 5080. As stated before, the Core 2's Single Cycle SSE unit is the reason for the Xeon 5160's superior performance.