The ~5 years between AMD's release of the Athlon 64 and Intel's Nehalem were truly AMD's glory days on the server. We had two clusters, one with pairs of 2.2 GHz Opteron 248 CPUs in its compute nodes and another with pairs of 3.4 GHz "Nocona" Xeons in its compute nodes. The Opteron nodes completely wiped the floor with the Xeon nodes in everything we threw at them, despite the Xeons enjoying a >50% clock speed advantage and a newer manufacturing process (90 nm vs. 130 nm).
Intel's "Core 2" CPUs scrapped the Pentium 4's NetBurst architecture in favor of an evolution of the Pentium M architecture (which was, in turn, an evolution of the Pentium III architecture), and Intel was competitive with AMD on the desktop again. Nehalem brought on-die memory controllers and QPI (Intel's HyperTransport-alike) in late 2008, which made Intel the performance champion on multi-socket servers. AMD's Bulldozer architecture was dead on arrival in 2011, and AMD never recovered from that.
Maybe AMD will pull a rabbit out of their hat with Zen...
Intel's "Core 2" CPUs scrapped the Pentium 4's NetBurst architecture in favor of an evolution of the Pentium M architecture (which was, in turn, an evolution of the Pentium III architecture), and Intel was competitive with AMD on the desktop again. Nehalem brought on-die memory controllers and QPI (Intel's HyperTransport-alike) in late 2008, which made Intel the performance champion on multi-socket servers. AMD's Bulldozer architecture was dead on arrival in 2011, and AMD never recovered from that.
Maybe AMD will pull a rabbit out of their hat with Zen...