Looking for a laptop? Whether or not you prefer AMD or Intel, a great place to start would be GoodLaptops.co.uk, where you will find the best laptop PC's on the market today at low prices, as well as guides to choosing the laptop most suited to your personal needs.

The processing demands on servers are quite different from standard laptops and desktops designed for everyday use, so there is a whole class of enterprise CPU designed specifically for workstations and servers. AMD and Intel are two of the major players in this market, AMD with their Opteron processors, and Intel with their Xeon processors. As with the other CPU sectors, there is fierce rivalry between the two companies, and this competition is driving the technology forward very rapidly indeed. Server class CPUs typically have to perform very complex calculations as part of data-intensive business applications, and they also need to operate efficiently in a multi tasking environment, as they are often called upon to perform several tasks simultaneously. Because of their immense processing power, and the fact that they are often in use 24 hours a day, servers can have high power consumption requirements, so energy efficiency is increasingly becoming a critically important factor in the design of CPUs.

The latest server class offerings from Intel and AMD are quite different from a technological point of view. Intel's latest Xeon processors are based on a revised form of their Nehalem architecture, known as Westmere, and feature 6 cores, while the latest Opteron CPU from AMD is based on their new Magny-Cours architecture, and features 12 cores. This means that the AMD processors have twice the number of cores, or separate processing components, as the Intel CPUs, so in theory can run more threads simultaneously without compromising on performance. However, the raw power provided by each core on the Intel processors is greater as they have higher clock speeds, negating some of this benefit. Which one is better depends on the applications that are going to be run, and whether they can take advantage of the extra cores. A lot of software will not actually benefit from having such a large number of cores, therefore a considerable amount of processing power would remain unharnessed. From this point of view, the Intel Xeon processors would make a more sensible choice, as each core would be more likely to be utilised, and the extra processing power available to each core on the would make the Xeon perform better when compared to the Opteron. However, for software that can really take advantage of the extra cores, the 12 cores of the Opteron really come into their own, as more processing tasks can be performed in parallel.

In conclusion, both AMD and Intel server class processors each offer different benefits in this highly competitive market. The competition amongst chip manufacturers is driving forward the technology and driving down the prices, which surely benefits the customer. However, there is no decisive answer to the question of which CPU is the best, as they are both outstanding in different ways. In terms of price, there is little between the AMD and Intel processors, so the important decision is just based on the products themselves. It is down to the end user to consider exactly what the intended use for the system will be, and make a choice based on whether the software that will be used can really take advantage of the extra cores, or whether the better raw performance of a more limited number of cores would be more suited.

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