Server duel: Xeon Woodcrest vs. Opteron Socket F

The eventual confrontation between Opteron and Woodcrest was inevitable in this articles, but anyone capable of adding one and one together will have known after the previous two pages that things would not look very good for AMD. Under a load of 25 to 100 simultaneous visitors, the Xeon performs on average 24% better in MySQL 4.1.20, 30% better in MySQL 5.0.20a and 37% better in PostgreSQL 8.2-dev. In a nutshell, the Socket F Opteron does not stand a chance: although it scales better, Woodcrest's starting point of a single core is high enough to rule out the scenario of Opteron overtaking it. We can imagine that more memory and production hardware would make a difference, but the Woodcrest does so much better that it does not seem as if the picture would change very much.