Over the past few years AMD has had a performance advantage over Intel. The competition will be tough when Intel introduces processors based on its 65 nanometer processing technology.

Hewlett-Packard told users that AMD dual-core Opteron would have performance lead over Intel’s dual-core Xeons in the first part of next year. They said it was too early to evaluate the performance of the chips that will be available from both companies in the second half of 2006.