DailyTech took a look at the marketing war of words between Intel and AMD in the server chip realm, specifically when it comes to the former’s Nehalem Xeon and the latter’s Shanghai Opteron.  We all love a good fight, but when evaluating server performance and overall energy efficiency, the processor plays a defining role.

We can’t leave anything to chance, and nor should we…

As we can see from the official SPECpower_ssj2008 results above, AMD’s “High Efficiency” (HE) products actually consume substantially more power than Intel’s low power products despite the fact that AMD advertises the lowest power consumption.  The idle power consumption gap is even larger which is significant since most servers spend most of their time low utilization states.  It’s clear that the million plus transistors Intel devoted to power management on the Nehalem chip is paying off.

Better luck next time, AMD.