An AMD Opteron processor-based server delivered up to 6 percent higher throughput when compared to an Intel Xeon (Woodcrest) based server while processing SQL Transactions against a Relational Database, according to Neal Nelson & Associates, a Chicago area computer performance consulting firm. "These test results seem to support recent speculation that the AMD Opteron processor architecture is superior to the Xeon architecture for applications with a large code footprint and complex execution profile" observed Neal Nelson, president of the independent consulting group.

The test was run with the Neal Nelson SQL Transaction Benchmark which generates traffic from up to 500 simultaneous World Wide Web clients and submits the transactions to a server system. It stresses all major sub-systems in a computer's architecture including memory access, inter-process communication, context switching, disk I/O and network I/O.

The two servers in this test were configured with the same clock speed and memory size. They were tested with the same disk drives and operating systems which had been loaded from the same media. The machines were set up with the same system tunables and ran the same application code which had been compiled by the same compiler with the same compiler options.

In the chart below you can see a graph of the data.