Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[yourbankruptcy]

Windsock, the only thing about Nocona performance vs. Opteron in 64 bits that we know for sure is -

Nocona can't DMA on addresses over 4 Gb, so the kernel is performing DMA into small areas in the kernel space and then copy them to user space. Operon doesn't need to do such stupid things.

That should give Opteron 20% - 30% speed advantage on database related tasks.

Nocona should be ok on lightweight tasks, where calculations are performed over small amount of data. If you run a simple webserver with static pages or simple scripts, Nocona is ok, if you run a database or an e-commerce site or a corporate mail server - Opteron will give you very significant performance advantage.