AMD’s processors aren’t the type of performance champs you’ve come to expect, on the workstation and server front things tend to get a bit stranger.

People in the market for new servers are looking beyond rendering speeds and are focusing on virtualization performance as their top priority.

AnandTech has a look at the AMD Opteron 2435 “Istanbul” 6-core processor. You’ll likely want to look elsewhere if you want your webserving and render farm performance but its virtualization pedigree is quite nice:

But the six-core “Istanbul” CPU has advantages
too. The Nehalem Xeon offers 8 logical cores, but the two threads on
each core have to share the 32 KB L1 and the tiny 256 KB L2. Istanbul
can work with “only” 6 threads, but each thread gets a 64 KB L1 and an
in comparison copious amount of 512 KB of L2. In a nutshell, It is
clear that the new AMD “Istanbul” Opteron targets a specific market: a
few compute intensive HPC applications, large databases and most
importantly: “heavy” virtualized workload. The reason why we say
“heavy” is that the six-core is a drop-in replacement for the current
quad-core Opterons. That means that the memory capacity of the servers
based on the new six-core will probably be the same. If you are
consolidating lots of light loads together, you are likely to run into
memory limits before you run into processing power limits.

A nice drop-in replacement if you’re up to the task of updating your company’s old servers, which isn’t a bad idea given the current climate.