Luckily, there are only really two manufacturers that produce commodity server-class CPUs. Furthermore, each vendor has a line of CPU designed specifically for server use. AMD and Intel both provide a similar price to performance curves, but that's where the comparison ends.
At the time of writing, the Intel Xeon CPUs benchmark is significantly higher than equivalently priced AMD Opterons. This is true for both mid-range and high-end processors. Before going through this recipe, it would be a good idea to visit AnandTech, Tom's Hardware, Intel, and AMD, just to get a basic idea of the landscape. There are a lot of benchmarks that compare various models of CPUs, so don't take our word for it.
Because of this current performance ...
