xeon vs opteron

During many benchmarks of both opteron and xeon products I have found many issues. On the opterons they suffer on single threaded tests. xeons suffer badly on multithreaded tests. While a xeon may rock in a single threaded encryption algorithm, whenever the tests required big memory sets ( 8 gig or more) xeons became sluggish. Opterons thrive on big memory, as long as there are 4 procs or less. Opterons totally kill on heavy multithreaded compression or encryption with big data sets. Xeons also have an issue with device access when doing benchmarks. On similar systems with the same disk tray's xeons slow down when doing calculations and disk access. opterons totally rock at this.

So in recap Big memory go with opteron, lots of disk access go with opteron. single process with a small file or memory size such as pgp or zip go with xeon.