Performance perspective
AMD launched its latest generation of server processors - codenamed Shanghai - last November and at the time we wrote that AMD needs to make the most of the window of opportunity available until Intel unveils its riposte.
A couple of months later than we anticipated that riposte has now arrived in the form of the Xeon 5500 family. While AMD will have been striving to take advantage of its head-start, it's not about to just concede defeat now that Intel has made its move.
So we spoke to AMD's EMEA product marketing manager for server, workstation and desktop CPUs, Mike Kreiten (pictured) to find out why AMD think people should still consider buying Opterons instead of the new Xeons.
We started by noting that Intel is claiming a massive performance increase with these new CPUs. "A small proportion of servers are bought just on performance," said Kreiten. "The performance side of things is not that important."
Now you don't have to be the most cynical person in the world to conclude that AMD is bound to say that if its competitor's products have a performance advantage. So we challenged Kreiten to detail what is important, if not performance.
