Re:The apocolypse is nigh... (Score 1)

It isn't about the price of Opteron processors for 4 and 8-way systems, but rather the performance. We have a bunch of Dell hardware, and the 6650 (4-way P4 Xeon MP) wasn't much faster than the 2650 (2-way P4 Xeon). The problem is the shared frontside bus in the Intel architecture is a bottleneck, which Hypertransport solves.

Still, unless you need that many CPUs in one box or you need tons of RAM (our Opteron cluster has 16-32G per node), it is cheaper to buy multiple smaller boxes. However, if you need the bigger SMP boxes you can get good performance from them with Opteron and you can't with Intel without a very fancy external bus system.