Battle of the chip giants: Comparing AMD’s Quad-Core Opteron with Intel’s Xeon 7300 MP
Here’s why you should care about the difference between Intel and AMD bus architectures I should be writing about Quad-Core Opteron, which was formally launched on Monday, but I feel the need to take a brief detour into a point-by-point contrast between AMD’s latest offering and Intel’s new quad-core Xeon MP 7300-series CPU. The MP designates the CPU for use in four-socket servers, which brings up the first difference between Opteron and Xeon MP: Opteron scales up to eight sockets. Intel certainly grabs your attention with its boast that quad-core Xeon 7300 performs at a nice, round 2X the speed of “prior generation” Xeon MP, yet reduces power consumption. The prior generation turns out to be Xeon 7100 MP, a dual-core CPU built with fatter transistors. Quad-core and process shrink brought Intel to the finish line. This muddy messaging doesn’t go over the heads of IT buyers, but X factors do get us press types excited. It turns out that Quad-Core Opteron is more than two times faster than its dual-core predecessor, and Quad-Core Opteron saves power not through process shrink, but by turning off or dimming the lights on walkways and in individual rooms that aren’t being used. The… READ MORE