Price Guides March 2005: Processors

Intel Xeon, AMD Opteron

It looks like it’s finally time for the Opteron 252 to start playing ball in the retail vendor market. We first saw performance of the Opteron 252 and the famous E4 stepping a little over a month ago, and since then, we haven’t been able to keep up with the number of requests from readers and parse engines looking for the product. $800 for the Opteron 252 [RTPE: OSA252FAA5BL] sounds a little bit too much for us to spend on a server processor, but considering the fact that no other Opterons support the SSE3 instruction set or the 90nm production process, the cost may be justified for some forward-looking IT managers.



Intel’s response to the Opteron x52 launch was less publicized; the Iriwindale ( Prescott 2M for servers) launch came and went without much fan fare. The Intel enterprise lineup works opposite to that of AMD’s; Intel’s server platforms are usually the slowest to update to new technologies.



Given that the larger cache size on Iriwindale probably comes in handy for database applications where large L3 caches are vogue, Xeon CPUs with much larger L2 cache could prove a very exciting step forward for Intel’s x86 enterprise lineup as a whole.