While I look forward to seeing what the server and motherboard vendors can do to bring down TCO, it appears that from an architecture point of view AMD continues to focus more on server TCO than Intel.

Overall, I don't recommend standardization on one processor over another. From a performance point of view, you should keep each application you plan to use in mind, and not assume that just because a benchmark test shows one thing that you'll experience the same results with your application in production. As an example, when testing our game City of Heroes we found that the game server itself ran much more efficiently on AMD-based servers than Intel servers without optimization of any type, while several of the benchmark tests showed the processors close to equal. The end result for City of Heroes ended up being that AMD Opteron was the fastest and the most energy efficient setup, which is definitely a winning combination.

Bruce Taylor
Chief Analyst
The Uptime Institute
Provider of research on data center operations, design and engineering

With microprocessor developers leap-frogging each other in terms of performance and energy efficiency improvements at the chip level, it's hard to keep up with what such developments may mean in terms of overall server performance and, more importantly, server performance per watt of electricity- an increasingly critical metric for CIOs to watch.

No particular performance advantage is to be gained by standardizing on one chip developer, anymore than there is to one server manufacturer. Today's server optimization and virtualization technologies help obviate the need to for such standardization. Having a mix of technology in the modern computer room is probably advisable. For one thing, it helps IT analysts monitor true performance and efficiency. For another, it may help keep the box makers honest and provide IT buyers with more leverage to demand energy efficiency improvements at the chip level.

The issues of power density in the data center are already acute and rapidly escalating. While an important consideration, the microprocessor architecture in the box is only a piece of a "whole-systems" problem relating to power supply and cooling capacity that's gone way out of whack in high-density computing environments. The anticipated growth in demand for server computing coupled with the corporate imperative for "greening" the data center will heighten the attention of IT managers to the utility meter and the power bill.

Donald Becker
CTO
Penguin Computing
Co-inventor, Beowulf Linux cluster

I see pros and cons to each chipset. For AMD, the pros include proven performance on a range of workloads; more cost-effective 4-processor Symmetric Multiprocessor systems (these are multiple CPUs in a single system with equal access to I/O and memory) and strong memory subsystem design. The big weakness with AMD is that the company, unlike Intel, has no internal compiler group, meaning AMD must depend on assembly programmers and compiler vendors to extract the best performance from changes and improvements they make to the CPU core.