Which is exactly where we use them. You either pay intel or you pay Microsoft. Either way you are going to pay. Personally I prefer paying Intel. Too bad AMD DB performance is craptastic (well that is an exaggeration) or someday we may have a some AMD heavy iron. Then again if you are old enough you remember the saying "Nobody ever got fired buying IBM". Well today it is "Nobody ever got fired buying Intel". Not sure I would be willing to put my career on the line for a $20K+ AMD Server.
Yeah, I do agree with you to a large extent. Intel has a much better control of their sales channel than the AMD. Intel is also better at publishing the utilities that allow for testing the CPU without disassembling the heatsinks.
But historically Intel also had problems with the resellers of their whitebox server line. (I'm not sure if they are still making the whole servers, for sure they do whitebox motherboards that carry no prominent "Intel" mark.)
In summary I'd say that the current version of this maxim would be: "You are much less likely to get fired for buying Intel than for buying AMD."
By the way, on our tests IOMMU in 64-bit AMDs provides generally better performance than the comparable Intel technology. However we use custom-written database engines, not the obvious market leading ones. Overall I'm pretty much agnostic in this battle, we support Intel&AMD&others 32&64-bit, Intel Itanium, IBM POWER&z/Arch,Sun/Fujitsu/Oracle SPARC. We still have happy paying customers for Digital Alpha,HP PA/RISC, only the SGI MIPS machines dropped out of support.
