Analysis - AMD insists performance not that important in server CPUs

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As attention turns to Intel?s new server CPU family, AMD highlights where it thinks Opterons still have an advantage.

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Kreiten listed three areas in which he considers AMD to still have an advantage:

* Memory management in virtualisation
* Live migration in virtualisation
* Energy efficiency

Regarding memory management, Kreiten explained that there is a performance penalty incurred by using virtualisation. "Now things are very memory intensive," he said. "RVI minimises the performance penalty for using virtualisation."

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The Xeon 5500's may suffer a larger relative performance penalty when Virtualised but they are still faster anyway so its complete tosh to suggest that AMD are better in this area.
Also, since the New Xeons are typically 1.5-2 times faster in performance where it matters on servers so you can now use less servers to do the same work or use servers with less Sockets which kind of throws the energy efficiency argument out of the window. That leads them with the live migration argument. That's the only one they have at all but that can be reduced by replacing all of your servers with Xeon 5500 based ones.

The only way Opteron servers can beat Nahalem servers is price.
The only reason to buy Opterons now is as an in place upgrade for the crappy Barcelona based ones.
I hope they do a 4800 series esque perfect storm on Intel in the next couple of years or they'll be relegated to cheapo low margin servers for a very long time.

as important and useful as i believe visualization is becoming, i would still tend to agree with with badass. I guess it depends what the server is being used for exactly.