"Closing Thoughts
Our tests show that Intel's Hyper Threading processors can provide a substantial performance boost, even if the number of active VMs exceeds the logical HT processor count. This is clearly due to the fact that with virtualization, there is a higher chance of producing two instructions to run on the integer and floating point units simultaneously, than is the case in a simple Windows environment. You can say that the NetBurst technology (which features Hyper Threading) could be called VMBurst and that it eases your virtualization overhead. An Intel quad CPU server with dual core CPUs and 16 HT units is likely to give a similar AMD Opteron quad CPU dual core server a run for the money, even at a Xeon clock speed of just 2.8 GHz. We are looking forward to pitting these setups against each other.
It is surprising that Hyper Threading is so effective, since most VMware specialists recommend turning it off. It is possible that the results are different with a lower CPU usage level and more VMs.
As you can see from the results, you really must test your applications on both AMD and Intel platforms in order to properly decide which is the faster alternative - the results can be surprising. Before we started testing, we suspected the floating point intensive Cplex application would be much faster on the AMD platform, but we were wrong. Although Intel's new dual core Xeon can't outperform the AMD Opteron under conventional server environments, it is likely to give AMD a solid beating in the virtualization space."
Sounds like Tom's leaving the decision on AMD versus Intel up to us.
