Dan, The spec scores where a single Itanium is a little faster in floating point (while still being slower in integer) than a single Opteron, but a 4-way (dual core) Opteron beats an 8-way Itanium in pretty much all tests, are particularly eye-opening.
I only follow TPC-C, where I notice that 4-way DC Opteron has the best score of all 4-way x86 solutions. However, 4-way single-core Itanium isn't that far behind, and 8-way Itanium is already ahead (though at 2.5X the price/performance ratio).
Keith posted some SAP benchmarks earlier, so I guess it depends on which benchmark you choose to highlight.
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