The new Xeon 45nm (or Xeon 54xx series) arrived in the lab weeks ago, so a server CPU benchmark update is overdue. However, there is another reason we decided to write this article. When AMD launched their newest quad-core chips, we could only give you a preview of its performance - not a full review. We did not fully understand many of the performance aspects of the new AMD architecture, so we decided to delve a little deeper.
We will only focus on performance in this article, as our primary goal is to get an idea where Barcelona (AMD's quad-core), Harpertown (Intel 45nm quad-core Xeon), and Clovertown (Intel quad-core 65nm Xeon) stand. To do so, we performed a minimal profiling of each of our benchmarks and we used several new micro benchmarks that will tell you a lot more than some real world benchmarks can. If you like understanding the benchmarks out there a bit better, dig in.