Elmer, Re: Yes you're right but this small set are AMD handpicked benchmarks. Don't you think Intel could handpick a set of benchmarks that told a completely different story?
I don't think you can blame AMD here for handpicking these benchmarks. TPC, Exchange Server, and SPECweb are all highly prestigious server benchmarks, and Opteron does superbly.
I did expect Opteron to come in higher in TPC, but the other benchmarks have impressed me. I must admit that AMD chose the right architecture, and it shows. Their scalability to 4P widens the gap in their favor (13%->18% in Exchange Server and 16%->51% in SPECweb99). How is Intel going to beat that? Opteron can even outperform Madison in SPECweb99_SLL, a specialized benchmark, but one that I thought would always have the lead. Xeon can't even touch it.
On the other hand, AMD's 64-bit performance isn't anything to write home about. They achieve most of their gains in 32-bit, so I wonder how they are going to push developers towards moving their software for so little returns.
Even so, if fanboys ever had a day to rejoice, this is it. If AMD wanted to get Intel's attention, I think they succeeded. They have really raised the bar here, and I think it's clear that Opteron will have performance leadership for some time to come, even at the current frequency. Since I can't imagine Opteron being stuck at 1.8GHz for long, I can't see Intel catching up in the short term (although I could be wrong, time will tell).
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