Intel Xeon and AMD Opteron Battle Head to Head

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As you can see, the Opteron outperforms the Xeon processor in the memory benchmarks and has a much lower latency. This is due to the use of an individual memory controller for each processor, as well as integrated memory logic in the Opteron CPU. The Xeon CPUs, on the other hand, perform better in the integer and floating point calculations.

Linpack is a software library providing the necessary tools for performing numerical linear algebra calculations on computers. This software library was used in the creation of the Linpack benchmark, which measures a system's floating point computational power. This software is Intel optimized, and when solving 22,000 sets of linear equations it uses over 3 GB of RAM, benefiting from the four fully buffered DIMM channels of the Intel Bensley platform . Version 3.0 also uses the new 16 instructions introduced with Woodcrest.

SunGard ACR is an application for financial services. It analyzes a large portfolio of client assets and generates a credit risk evaluation. This is a very computation-intensive application, as it uses sophisticated mathematical probabilities under multiple scenarios to generate a risk analysis. In this benchmark the Xeon 5160 was 22% faster than the Opteron.