Server Shopping — Intel’s new Xeon 7140 or AMD Opteron?

November 17, 2006 1 By Tad Reeves

Needles to say, the Xeon 70xx is and was a small disaster and one of the reasons why AMD’s Opteron gained so much support so quickly. With that kind of heritage, the expectations for the Xeon MP 71xx, aka Tulsa, are not high. Is Tulsa yet another power gobbling CPU which can’t outperform the competition? Although the CPU is sitting completely in the shadow of Intel’s newest Core based Xeons, Intel engineering did spend a lot of time on trying to make the last NetBurst CPU perform well and consume less.Tulsa is a dual core Xeon built on Intel’s very successful 65 nm process. It is a true dual core, with both cores sharing some control logic and a large L3 cache which can be 4, 8 or 16 MB in size. Tulsa can scale up to 3.4 GHz, but we tested the more affordable 3.2 GHz version with 8 MB cache.

AnandTech: Intel’s newest Quad Xeon MP versus HP’s DL585 Quad Opteron

Just found some excellent benchmarks for the Intel Xeon 7100 series, vs the AMD Opteron, Intel Xeon 5100 and Sun CoolThreads boxes.  Most interesting to me are the Java server, MySQL and SSL benchmarks, as it makes it plain exactly where Intel is at in the quad-cpu market. 

Nowadays, one can get a server with 16 logical cores, all for around 10-15k.  Pretty nuts, and a preposterous amount of processing power at the everyday man’s disposal.

I still want to favor AMD Opterons – just because I love an underdog, but Intel’s Xeon 5100 series is pretty blasted compelling.

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