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AMD has extended the workstation-oriented Opteron family of processors with the addition of the Opteron 2222 SE and the Opteron 8222 SE for two and four/eight-way servers, respectively. These new models run at a speedy 3GHz and offer 2MB L2 cache, similar to other processors in the family.

Last year, AMD made waves with a rapidly increasing server market share at Intel’s expense. The rivalry between these two seems far from ending as AMD executives went on touting the results of several benchmark tests that, according to the company, show these chips outperforming Intel's Xeon processors.

The SPECint test compared the Opteron, running in a Tyan Thunder n4250QE motherboard with 8GB memory and 80GB SATA (Serial ATA) disk drive and using Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 SP3, with the Xeon, running in an FSC Primergy TX300 S3 with 16GB memory and a 73GB SAS disk drive and using Windows 2003 Server Enterprise Edition SP1. The Opteron outperformed the Xeon by a score of 56.6 to 55.2, according to the results provided by AMD.

A second test, the SPECfp, used similar configurations to the SPECint, only the Opteron was tested on a system using SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 SP3, while the Intel ran on a system using SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10. In this test, the Opteron outscored the Xeon by a score of 52.1 to 45.1. A third test also showed AMD's product outpacing Intel's.
A new quad-core Opteron design called code-named “Barcelona” is expected later this year hitting speeds in excess of 3 GHz.