Well just to see how you people go for server should you decide to
either get a new one or further expand your hosting business. Intel Xeon or AMD Opteron?

Opteron tends to use less power than Xeon. However, Xeon will have more performance over Opteron.

A 4-socket server will either be a 16-cores Opteron or a 24-cores Xeon.

Xeon Dunnington which will be coming out later half this year will include 6 processing cores per chip.

This depends on where your data center is located. In some places where electricity is expensive you would want to go with the more economical procesor. In other places you would want to go with the performance processor.

Have a look at 2 these companies
http://serverbeach.com/servers/index.php and http://hqhost.net/en/dedicated.html
In both AMD servers are used to provide premium solutions. I think that this short surway can explain you little bit.
You get what you pay for.
I hope it will help you and you understand my posting.

Power costs are significant, often the most expensive component in hosting (in Canada anyway).

AMD processors, up until recently were the best for low power requirements, but for performance, Intel is king right now.

Intel rules IMO.

I heard that specialists recommend AMD Opteron more often nowadays

I don't know why people are preferring the Xeon over the Opteron here, the Opteron is easily the better choice.

If you want a really energy efficient setup then why not go for a single 65W quad core Phenom rather than two dual core Opterons? The question might be a little hypothetical considering the 9150e hasn't been released yet, but it is only a matter of months now (I hope). Any thoughts on how the two would compare performance wise?

It is amazing that AMD still seem to have the edge in performance per Watt. It is a shame they are still on a .65 process, their current chips on a .45 process would be truly phenomenal.

Jim

I'm 100% AMD and have always preferred it that way with the exception of the K5 era. I recently put a couple of dual quad core 2350's online with SAS drives and I simply cannot find their limits yet. I dumped 3 well loaded servers onto one and it is just looking at me asking if that is all I got for it.

we use opteron on one of our server and run smoothly also great power too