A pre-launch sample of Intel's Dempsey CPU and Bensley platform served as a sneak preview of what to expect. THG's benchmarks also indicate how the platform will fare against AMD's Opteron 280:

The Dempsey processor paired with the Bensley platform did not exactly impress us in the tests, at least when compared to the similar (but somewhat aging) AMD architecture. When AMD launches its new Socket F platform sometime around mid-summer, we predict AMD will once again come out on top, unless Intel manages to stretches the performance envelope even further. It is, however, still difficult to say how much of an impact the Woodcrest processors are going to make. A lot definitely depends on actual availability.

The Intel architecture still benefits from Hyperthreading, especially with a massive eight units in a two processor, dual-core server. This will speed execution on Web servers and relational database servers where lots and lots of threads run simultaneously. However, some applications are still negatively affected.

The AMD system is, however, our overall test winner. We are looking forward to testing it against the final releases of Dempsey, and eventually, Woodcrest processors in the near future.

Our reference single core systems clearly showed us that future and current multi-threaded applications will and do benefit from multiple cores. The single cores only have a purpose if your application run only one thread due to age or license issues. Anyway, the single cores will soon be history as the multi cores gain clock speed. Software vendors who have not begun to convert applications to be fully thread-optimized yet or still license by core will lose out. Multiple cores and parallelism will drive future performance gains.