The SPECjbb and SAP tests show that AMD's quad-core Opteron, even at 2.3GHz, is a very potent server CPU. In fact, if the current Barcelona chips would not have been stuck at these rather disappointing clock speeds, AMD would have given Intel's engineers a really though challenge. Now it is a very close call, just like in the LINPAC benchmark. At the end of the day, that does not really matter. What matters is that the enterprise that wants to run a Java or an ERP application can run it on a server with an excellent performance/Watt ratio. The AMD and Intel platform are very close in this respect, but AMD pulls slightly ahead thanks to the lower power consumption when running at low load. In many cases, ERP and Java applications run at low load during some parts of the day. Many of the HPC benchmarks (Fluent, LSDyna) also give the AMD CPU an advantage.