The ~5 years between AMD&#x27;s release of the Athlon 64 and Intel&#x27;s Nehalem were truly AMD&#x27;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 &quot;Nocona&quot; 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 &gt;50% clock speed advantage and a newer manufacturing process (90 nm vs. 130 nm).<p>Intel&#x27;s &quot;Core 2&quot; CPUs scrapped the Pentium 4&#x27;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&#x27;s HyperTransport-alike) in late 2008, which made Intel the performance champion on multi-socket servers.  AMD&#x27;s Bulldozer architecture was dead on arrival in 2011, and AMD never recovered from that.<p>Maybe AMD will pull a rabbit out of their hat with Zen...