As a Sun sales rep, I can tell you that I have every intention of continuing to recommend AMD to my x64 customers, almost all of whom are using them for scientific HPC. Xeon has it's place in the Windows world running Exchange or AD, which is a market that until now Sun did not really compete, but now can. As Schwartz says - this is not about us or Intel attacking either of our competitor's install base, it is about approaching a growing market together, and being able to provide the best solutions for any given customer problem.

Is Tom suggesting that AMD's current parts are better than Intel's Core2? From our internal benchmarks and from what we've seen in the trades, it looks like - today - Intel is winning on price, performance, power & heat.

I agree that AMD has some nifty things coming down the pike but Intel's 45nm press release makes one wonder. Besides, I'm buying servers now and can't wait for AMD's next big thing.

My question to Jon is, which applications and what benchmarks? Opteron shines in 64-bit environments in applications requiring fast buses, large memory and massive parallelism. There's no way Intel can come close in these, and I suspect many "applications of the future" are going to be just this type. Unfortunately for the facile comparison, server motherboards incorporating the "good stuff" in the I/O buses and memory channels tend to be expensive. Therefore, as Bill indicates, AMD has a (perhaps temporary) disadvantage in the cheap server and gamer desktop spaces. AMD's "nifty" features are actually fundamental advantages in the 64-bit world. Considering that Microsoft has now blessed that world, 64-bit performance will become far more important in the very near future, and I predict that when volume in "true" 64-bit motherboards rises and chipset costs drop, we'll start to see some very different test results.