What's Intel's up and coming Woodcrest doing? Apparently, it's beating the Opteron in several industry performance benchmarks. In particular, Intel release their own benchmarking results today comparing in 20 aspects the Woodcrest core (successor to the short-lived Dempsey) versus the AMD Opteron 285. In many tasks, such as Microsoft Exchange and others, the Woodcrest came ahead. Clock speeds, bus speeds, memory interfaces and others are not released, and Intel probably swung this in their own favor, but even if partially true it could potentially bring a lot of customers back to Intel who switched to Opteron. Woodcrest will first be released in the Dual Core Xeon 5100 series next month. It'll be interesting to see independent benchmarks be release, and then again another set when Opteron makes it to DDR-2 platforms.