Intel EMT64 Xeon vs AMD Opteron

[Freebsd9999 at aol.com]

> cguttesen at yahoo.sk  writes

>> Cost wise, AMD Opteron 246 is roughly the same cost
>> as a 3.0Ghz Xeon ... But
>> how do they compare performance wise; specifically
>> related to FreeBSD?
>
>We have a dual xeon (nocona) @ 3.2 GHz and a dual
>opteron @ 2 GHz, both with 4 GB RAM and running the
>amd64-port. My impression is that the opteron performs
>*slightly* better than it's Intel-cousin.


uh, "slightly better" at doing what? 

For pure networking, for example, a single 3.2 Xeon will 
outperform a dual opteron in most cases, but perhaps 
not at tasks that are well suited for multiprocessing. 
Factors like whether your NICs are on separate 
(tunneled) busses, whether you're using pci-express, etc
will have a rather large impact on results. Its not just an
"is A better than B" issue. And results will vary from MB
to MB. "Most" opteron motherboards are not optimized
to use the processor to its full advantages. 

Two different motherboards using exactly the SAME 
processor will have possibly substantial performance 
differences, so its rather difficult to compare different 
make processors that don't run on the same MB without 
qualifying the results. All you can really say is that
Processor A on THIS motherboard performs better than
Processor B on THAT motherboard when doing THIS
particular task.