Over the years the Xeon processor has the reputation of a very stable server processor.  The Opteron is a little too new for us to comment on using practical experience but we have heard nothing but positive news.  With AMD in general comes an expectation of quality. We have utilized hundreds of AMD CPU's over the last eight years with "0" processor failures and we never experienced any incompatibility issues with AMD CPU's. We see no reason to expect any less from the Opteron.

The one case of incompatibility we have experienced did not involve the CPU but rather the supporting chipset on the motherboard.  The problem involved a RAIDCase made by ARCO not supporting the VIA chipset; because of this we pulled the plug on the ARCO units, wouldn't even think of changing processor platforms just for the RAIDCases.  

In the coming months we expect Intel to fight hard to increase the performance of both their Xeon and Itanium platforms.  In our view, the largest benefit of a strong and successful offering such as the Opteron is to introduce stiff competition in a marketplace that would otherwise be dominated by too few manufacturers who are all to willing to dig deep into their customers pockets.  Even if you have always built with other platforms you owe a dept of gratitude to AMD for the prices you are paying - especially with the Intel family of processors that competes directly with AMD.

We have seen the bulk of our Windows developers and website owners migrating their applications to run off of Microsoft SQL 2000 and using .NET.  Before you can run Microsoft intermediate language it must be converted by a .NET Framework just-in-time (JIT) compiler to native code, which is CPU-specific code that runs on the same computer architecture as the compiler.  It does not favor, in our opinion, the older less powerful Pentium III servers still common in the hosting industry. They do a credible job but are certainly not desirable for optimum hosting and they are noticeably much slower, especially the first time the .NET application loads.  

It is this move to database driven dynamically powered websites with an increasing reliance on more sophisticated code behind sites that is continuing to raise the bar on the computational horsepower required for even the average domain owner.  An affordable Opteron server is coming to the hosting market just in time to serve this current and the future generations of websites.   AMD's performance for the price is at a very sweet spot in almost any budget.