Quote Originally Posted by Katanai View Post
Yes actually I am and like I've said Nehalem is selling like crazy. It's a very successful architecture. And the part with AMD systems being way cheaper is more of a myth than anything. The platform as a whole is a bit cheaper in most cases but the difference is not as big as you make it out to be. I don't know where you have the info from that AMD is making lots of sales right now. As for virtualization performance, until AMD implements an analogue to Hyper-threading they don't got anything going for them. Doubling the amount of cores is not really the best solution as it also almost doubles the costs. We'll have to wait and see, 12 core CPU's sound good. If they manage to take the next step and manage to implement a form of Hyper-threading technology to the next generation, like they are talking now, those CPUs should be monsters. Don't get me wrong though, I got absolutely nothing against AMD. The Opteron was a revolutionary CPU and it actually sold less than it should have. I'm just saying it how it is at the moment...

Anyway enough thread derailing, this is about Itanium not Nehalem...
hyperthreading in virtualization is only usefull when you have huge amount of very small vm's, once you have many vCPU VM with avarage/high load hyperthreading is useless, real cores aren't. perhaps check this and look at my remark below about price and question again why so many people buy intel for virtualization: (not to mention before nehalem was there or the crap 7xxx series in virtualization) http://it.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=3571&p=10
It's only the top bin that is a bit faster but also double price.

I assume that you are talking about retail prices, I talk about major volume where an AMD 2435 is almost equal to E5530 in price. Now check again where the price/performance ratio will be..... not to mention soon to be released 4000-6000 series adding cores isn't the biggest cost, that is small die size.