Both companies' processors offer dependability and computing power. But AMD has excelled at making the processors depend on less power to operate, which means a savings to the customer, not just in acquisition and overall operating costs. Compared to AMD, some of the Pentium 4 and old Xeons we use run hot.

I believe both Intel and AMD will provide support, but AMD made a strong push earlier in the 64-bit market and built a solid reputation in the past few years around this. They provide great support with 64-bit OS vendors, such as CentOS, Red Hat, Fedora Core, Free BSD and now Windows. They are also great for anything database intensive or with high I/O, and they are active in virtualization communities. Intel has also done well with initiatives in this area. However AMD has been very vocal and active about developing technology to improve overall performance with virtualization.

Peter Jarvis
VP and CIO
NCsoft
Publisher of entertainment software

Beyond the obvious arguments about whether or not caching schemes and bus architecture is better between either AMD or Intel processors, the primary concern at NCSoft is the total cost of ownership (TCO) of the entire server.

NCSoft is charged a premium for high-density power and cooling throughout our operating environments around the world, so keeping the server TCO at a minimum is priority for us. Research has shown that over the minimum three-year lifetime we try and get out of a processor, AMD's Opterons have provided the lowest possible TCO to date.

While the processor type for our live games was set a few years back, we continuously evaluate new processors by both Intel and AMD in order to ensure we're still getting the best TCO for each product and project. While AMD Opteron processors have proven to be the best fit in most game server situations, we are not phasing out Intel processor-based servers; we have them installed in our data centers today at a lower quantity and will continue to consider them going forward for all types of applications.

NCSoft is currently having very good luck with Intel's quad-core technology when used in SQL servers. The Intel quad-core technology looks promising and is definitely a step in the right direction as far as processing power goes. However, many of the TCO issues are not addressed with the new Intel server architecture. Even though these processors are much more energy efficient, the memory choices available in servers keep the overall power consumption higher than optimal and keep TCO up in general.