Evolving with the market
If you think there are a lot of benchmarks for desktop CPUs, you should check out the server sector. At the launch of its Xeon 5500 server processor in April, Intel crammed 12 onto a slide and claimed 30 world records.
All this extra performance, claimed Intel, would deliver rapid ROI (return on investment) as fewer servers would be required to deliver the same result.
AMD soon begged to differ, however, with server/workstation business development director John Fruehe blogging that there are all sorts of other costs to be factored in before you can make an ROI calculation and that the cost of the hardware itself is a relatively small part of the total cost of a server deployment.
Who was right? Both and neither probably, with some usage models requiring high performance and others putting a greater emphasis on efficiency. And AMD claims the launch of its latest server processor - the Opteron EE - acknowledges this by specifically targeting the latter model, as predicted by HEXUS over a year ago.
"We're seeing a real bifurcation in the marketplace," said Bart Arnold, a senior product marketing manager in AMD's server and workstation business, speaking to HEXUS.channel. "It used to be a very benchmark-driven market, which we did well in. But by 2005 CIOs started being tasked with bringing the cost of the data-centre down."
