Price Guides, May 2005: Processors

Intel Xeon, AMD Opteron

Dual core Opterons are the most interesting thing to occur to server processors in a long while. Although we covered AMD and Intel’s side of the dual core race extensively, Opteron has some pretty strong selling points with regard to multiple processor and multiple core scalability. Although certainly novel, the cost of these processors has yet to stabilize while the cheapest available dual core processor costs upwards of $1500!


The server market doesn’t have much else going on right now, and aside from a few new Irwindale introductions, there really isn’t much to comment on. nForce4 Pro for AMD servers is quite fantastic, and certainly worth the praise that it received from the reviews around the web. Now that Socket 940 is relatively affordable and more importantly competitive, these dual core behemoths should really make for some interesting benchmarks in the near future.

Finally, below, you can see a glimpse of Xeon pricing for the week. The Irwindale processors are starting to show up more frequently, but only at a few merchants still. The preorder prices have dropped dramatically in the last few weeks, but prices won’t stabilize for another month or so.