Although Intel reclaimed the raw performance crown from AMD with its recent processor generations (Nehalem and Westmere), the Sunnyvale upstart can still win one-on-one performance contests with, at times, impressive results. The 12-core AMD Opteron Magny-Cours processor (named for the French town that is the site of a Formula One racing course) demonstrated remarkable performance under high parallel loads that its closest Intel competitor could not match. To be clear, Intel does not currently sell a 12-core beast, so tests were run against the eight-core Intel Xeon Nehalem-EX processor.
In tests of dual Magny-Cours (24 cores) versus dual Nehalem-EX (16 cores), the AMD chip was slower up to 24 processes, but significantly faster once this barrier was breached. At 96 and 128 processes, the Magny-Cours achieved a performance advantage of 25 percent over Intel -- a rarely attained gap in CPU performance results. Available at substantially lower cost than the competition, the AMD processor is ideally suited for dense computational work, such as virtualization hosting or running numerous parallel processes, where its tight design and massive number of cores deliver unprecedented computing throughput.
