Quote Originally Posted by Nedjo View Post
Not only does AMD's 4P CPU has better price/performance ratio, it sits in the same mobo that customer has! For Xeon series 7300 you need new mobo. Also for Barcelona you need RDRAM and for Xeon 7300 series you need much more expensive FB-DIMM's.

All in all 4P Barcelona is far more superior product.

Regarding the "niche" market... if you call auto, space, oil, mining, financial… niche (aka not worthy) markets, then OK, but targeting these market is the smartest thing that AMD could have done. Those guys have money, and they buy a lot
And for the reference pricing of new Xeons, and new Opterons:
XEON
• X7350 @ 2.93GHz, 8MB L2 cache, 130W TDP at $2310
• E7340 @ 2.40GHz, 8MB L2 cache, 80W TDP at $1980
• E7330 @ 2.40GHz, 6MB L2 cache, 80W TDP at $1391
• E7320 @ 2.13GHz, 4MB L2 cache, 80W TDP at $1177
• E7310 @ 1.60GHz, 4MB L2 cache, 80W TDP at $856

OPTERON
• 8350 @ 2.0GHz, 95W TDP at $1004
• 8347 @ 1.9GHz, 95W TDP at $774
• 8346 HE @ 1.8 GHz, 68W TDP at $688

AMD's pricing only makes it very clear with which Intel parts they are competing ; that is 2GHz K10 is more or less equal to the E7320 in apps that customers care about.

If anything , that's worrying.You know why ? Because in that segment you're overlapping with DP , for that money you can buy a 5365 3GHz QC Xeon that would cream the K10.Few apps scale well to 16 cores , instead of 16 cores you're better off with 8 faster ones.

I'm pretty sure an 8 core 3GHz Xeon system will be cheaper and perform close enough to a 16 core 2Ghz K10 system in most commercial apps.