We don't currently have the data to say one way or the other, so this argument seems kind of pointless.
We have a poster here (not you) who loves to make things up. I was just showing that while someone here claim Opteron will not suffer bottlenecks at 8-way to the extent Xeon will(as usual in the absence of any data), the only results out there for Opteron in transaction benchmarks show it losing to Xeon in a 4-way configuration. I guess we will have to wait for more data but that doesn't stop some of our favorite posters from making it up in it's absence.
Racksaver TPC data-- The Racksaver system is configured almost identically to the HP, Dell, and IBM systems that get very similar TPM-c Results. If you look at the detailed reports submitted by the vendors you will notice that racksaver charges much less than Dell or IBM for both memory and disk subsystems, for virtually identical hardware. Note that racksaver does not break out the cost of the memory, but for $35K you get the 32G of memory plus the 4P opteron system.
company TPMC cost/tpmc users memory mem cost disk type storage cost racksaver 82226 2.72 66k 32G 35K* 294 disks 15K scsi 92K Dell 84595 3.58 67k 32G 27899 296 disks 15K scsi 140000 HP 84712 3.83 67k 32G 34396 239 disks 15K scsi 120,000? IBM 90271 3.97 72k 32G 46384 238 disks 15K scsi 182,000</PRE> Racksaver 4P opteron system 82,226: http://www.tpc.org/tpcc/results/tpcc_result_detail.asp?id=103071002 Dell 4P Xeon system 84,595: http://www.tpc.org/tpcc/results/tpcc_result_detail.asp?id=103063003 HP 4P Xeon System 84712: http://www.tpc.org/tpcc/results/tpcc_result_detail.asp?id=103090802 IBM 4P Xeon System 90272: http://www.tpc.org/tpcc/results/tpcc_result_detail.asp?id=103101701 I am not arguing that Xeon scaling in spec is not much worse than Opteron, but in this real world application that values SMP, Xeon does very well. If you look at TPC-H where clusters are used, Opteron does very well...along with clusters of 2P Xeon nodes. I am sure Intel has some plans to improve the pathetic 4P specfp performance of Xeon. Exactly what is not clear yet, but the 4M L3 cache and faster FSB will help. I suspect they will also change the cache policy a bit and perhaps adjust prefetching some. We will know more when the prescott version of these products become available. --Alan