Intel managed to raise the bar in our small to medium tests, and matched the Opteron 250's performance. Thanks to a 400MHz clock increase and a 266 MHz FSB increase, Intel is competitive in a small-medium load pattern like our test simulates. Although the results in the enterprise workload were interesting, they really aren't all that surprising. As we said in the "AMD Opteron vs. Intel Xeon: Database Performance Shootout" article, the Xeon's shared FSB implementation is holding back performance. The longer pipeline of the Prescott core was also a factor, as the Nocona 3.6 barely managed a 1% lead in performance over the Prestonia 3.2 GHz part.

AMD shows strength in architecture again; their point-to-point HyperTransport and the on die memory controller are the pillars of AMD's server architecture. The question is, does it translate into market share? Time will tell on this one. Hopefully, the results that we are illustrating here will make IT directors and those responsible for implementation educate themselves on the processor architectures available to them.