AMD Says Virtualization on Opteron Cheaper Than on Intel Xeon

AMD's server business was hit hard in the second quarter, while Intel appeared to have picked up market share.

AMD can use every opportunity to promote its Opteron processors, so it comes in handy that the company found that Opteron processor-based servers are much more cost-efficient in virtualization scenarios than Intel Xeon-based systems.

After running VMmark 2.1 benchmarks, the company concluded that choosing Opteron over Xeon could reducing the capital expense by up to 30 percent and result in savings of up to $130,000 in single-rack, high-end servers. The test compared an $8,908 HP DL385 Gen8 server using two Opteron 6284SE processors versus a $15,525 DL380p Gen 8 server with two Xeon E5-2690 processors.

AMD said its system posted a result of 8.31 @ 8 Tiles per 2 host systems with 32 VMs per server, while the Intel system came in at 11.05 @ 10 Tiles for two host systems with 40 VMs per server. The $130,000 savings are based on savings of $6617 per server x21 for a 21U rack.

Of course, there are several ways how to run this benchmark in specific configurations and depending on the requirements of an application area. Earlier this year, HP posted a result of 8.31 @ 8 tiles, exactly matching AMD's Opteron result, by using a ProLiant DL385p Gen8 server with a single Xeon E5440 processor.   

Wolfgang Gruener is a contributor to Tom's IT Pro. He is currently principal analyst at Ndicio Research, a market analysis firm that focuses on cloud computing and disruptive technologies, and maintains the conceivablytech.com blog. An 18-year veteran in IT journalism and market research, he previously published TG Daily and was managing editor of Tom's Hardware news, which he grew from a link collection in the early 2000s into one of the most comprehensive and trusted technology news sources.

See here for all of Wolfgang's Tom's IT Pro articles.