Johan De Gelas of Aceshardware.com has a nice review comparing performance between a quad Opteron 848, dual Opteron 248, and dual 3.06 GHz Pentium 4 Xeon DP (1 MB L3). Some of the apps used were Java application server benchmarks, MySQL datamining benchmarks, 3D max 5.1, Cinebench 2003 and much more. AMD opteron Quad Opteron 848 (4 thread) wins hands down. The performance of Quad Opteron 848 is so good that Johan De Gelas says the 3.2 Xeon DP with 2 MB L3-cache, coming early next year will have a hard time dethroning Quad Opteron 848. How did Opteron 848 win? To see the complete results read the detailed review here: www.aceshardware.com. In this BIOS screenshot, four Opterons breaking past 4 GB limit
Picture courtesy of AcesHardware.com