Morrow, Re: Though I am not suprised that Specrate is suddenly the most important measure here:)
In all seriousness, I think it is worth discussing SPEC_rate more than SPEC, for the simple reason that processors are going multithreaded and multicored, and SPEC is just a single threaded benchmark (well, maybe not SPEC2004, but that may yet be a ways off). Opteron's huge performance here will also translate favorably to other applications that use the same compilers, and that includes HPC, which is a market common for recompiling their apps to attain the best performance. It is one of the reasons why IPF has been so successful in this market, and now Opteron is encroaching here. While I think it's somewhat skewed to compare a brand new Opteron result with an IPF processor that's already more than a year old, it's simply a reality to the market that AMD is going to stack up more Opteron upgrades over the course of a year than Intel is likely to do with IPF, and that could advantageously benefit them in smaller businesses or in price/performance sensitive contracts.
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