No, because the price ratios are completely different once you add in disks. X over Y is not equal to X+N over Y+N if we're dealing with positive numbers.

To bring in a car analogy (I know, everyone's favorite thing, right?), this is like subtracting out the cost of non-engine parts and claiming an electric car is 10 times more expensive than a similar non-electric car. Well, such price comparisons are disingenuous, because no one ever buys just an engine; they need the entire rest of the car!

You can't ignore disks and claim order of magnitudes of price difference, just like you can't ignore costs of power and cooling and software. You won't be running without disks, electricity, or software, I trust?

Please do. Otherwise, you might as well be describing invisible pink unicorns. Your statements about pricing are wildly divergent from the reality I am seeing.

AMD doesn't exist outside of the low end server space. Precisely what sector were you talking about, where you can price out an AMD machine on the web? The machines I was talking about scale out to greater than 4 sockets, and possess features aimed at the highest end of the market such as RAS and multi-year service/software support contracts. AMD's latest Interlagos models don't even support more than 4 sockets without custom interconnects and glue logic, and if you're going for more sockets than that, you're in Top500 supercomputer territory, where cost is not a consideration anyway. If it were, AMD would be doing better than it is, as that is the only reason to buy an AMD server nowadays.

Top 500 stats by processor family:

x86-64 - 435

Intel Xeon - 372

AMD Opteron - 62

If you look at the historical graphs, AMD has been falling in share ever since 2009.

The cost difference is not nearly an order of magnitude when you take into account all the other components of the server besides CPUs you have to pay for anyway.

http://arstechnica.com/business/2011/11/bulldozer-server-benchmarks-are-here-and-theyre-a-catastrophe/

Not to mention that Intel wins on performance/watt and performance/core and thus in total cost of ownership when power consumption and software licensing costs are taken into account. http://www.anandtech.com/show/5279/the-opteron-6276-a-closer-look/12

The competitive picture has not improved for AMD since then, with the release of the Intel Xeon E5's that are Sandy-Bridge based 6 months ago, as opposed to the Westmere-based Xeons that were benchmarked in the above reviews.

This hasn't been true for about 4 years. Intel is now so crushingly ahead of AMD in the server space performance-wise and energy-efficiency-wise that they hold 94.5% of the server/workstation market. http://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-intel-cpu-processor,15041.html

And since server/workstation hardware costs are dwarfed by server/workstation software license costs, which tend to be per core, that means that the total cost of ownership of fewer Intel cores is actually less than the TCO of more, slower AMD cores that deliver the same performance. It turns out that due to Amdahl's Law, single-threaded performance matters even more in the many-core space.

I'd say less than 10%. The vast majority of games and encoders in Windows are compiled with Microsoft's Visual C.

It makes a difference of 1-2% on x264. Nothing earth-shattering. http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=1530754#post1530754

Er, no. Gainestown (the 2-socket version of Nehalem) was released in March 2009, with system availability by the summer.

What? AMD is hovering around 6% market share in the server market, with Intel making up the other 94%! Intel has been dominating there ever since they were the first to introduce a quad-core server processor (Clovertown,) back in November 2006. Intel's average selling price (ASP) is also 33% higher. AMD's chips just do not perform anywhere near as well as Intel's on most server tasks. AMD really needs Bulldozer to improve their competitive position if they want to remain a player in the server processor market.

Psst... http://shop.amd.com/US/Pages/ShopHome.aspx . You're welcome. ;)

You can get 64-core Intel servers: http://www.sap.com/solutions/benchmark/sd2tier.epx

NEC Express5800 Model A1080a-E, 8 Processors / 64 Cores / 128 Threads, Intel Xeon Processor X7560, 2.26 Ghz, 64 KB L1 cache and 256 KB L2 cache per core, 24 MB L3 cache per processor

18185 users, 99450 SAPS

HP ProLiant DL980 G7, 8 Processors / 64 Cores / 128 Threads, Intel Xeon Processor X7560, 2.26 Ghz, 64 KB L1 cache and 256 KB L2 cache per core, 24 MB L3 cache per processor

18180 users, 99320 SAPS

AMD's best result is:

HP ProLiant BL685C G7, 4 Processors / 48 Cores / 48 Threads, AMD Opteron Processor 6174, 2.2 Ghz, 128 KB L1 cache and 512 KB L2 cache per core, 6 MB L3 cache per 6 cores

8675 users, 47420 SAPS

Even restricting Intel to 4 processors and 32 cores, it soundly beats AMD's best result in SAP-SD by 20%!

HP ProLiant DL580 G7, 4 Processors / 32 Cores / 64 Threads, Intel Xeon Processor X7560,, 2.26 Ghz, 64 KB L1 cache and 256 KB L2 cache per core, 24 MB L3 cache per processor

10445 users, 57020 SAPS