Apple's Xserve G5 is a powerful machine -- just not in ways that are easy to get across to the IT market.
It is not a general-purpose computing barn burner. In business-style integer and floating-point tests, a 2-GHz Xserve G5 comes in at about half the calculating power of a 2.2-GHz Opteron running in pure 64-bit mode.
The G5's memory performance is excellent, but it degrades in a linear fashion under load, whereas Opteron's memory performance degrades more slowly. Opteron is cheaper, faster in common computation, and more consistent in terms of how fast it accesses memory.
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