You certainly don't have to take our word for the performance of the Opteron; several very smart organizations and industry observers have already concluded that the Opteron is no slouch.  Sun, for example has their Sun Fire V20z server, IBM offers their Opteron based IBM eServer® 325 and HP has the ProLiant DL145.  On the other hand, Dell strangely enough has not rolled out a Opteron server at the time of this writing - which means in our opinion they are not as smart as we thought they were. 

It is worth touching on the elegance of the AMD design and the not so simple equation of not only how fast can we build a server but how fast should we build a server and at what corresponding cost.  As far as technical design decisions there are too many to note here but even to a novice one very important consideration is the onboard memory controller.  No mass market memory types are remotely capable of keeping up with a processor like the Opteron, so in order to keep the CPU busy it is important to have a local cache of memory that can match the processors' speed.   The computer's efficient operation depends on data held in memory being available in a few nanoseconds.

On the other hand this type of memory is very expensive - if you go too far you will no longer have a product that appeals to smaller business and even individual power users.

 

Intel has rolled out their press machine to fight back and try to claim the 64bit high-ground. According to Tom's Hardware Intel owes an big apology to AMD.  The news seems to be that Intel has "pulled the plug and stopped the hemorrhaging, by relegating the Itanium to the status of a "database processor".  It will be left to the Xeon to compete with the Opteron and the geeks at SecureWebs are betting on the Opteron.