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Although the AMD chips look like they "could" give intel a run for their money to some extent it will depend on where larger IT hungry companies are on their upgrade cycles. Bringing out a new chip the year AFTER a large proportion of the market has upgraded isn't anywhere near as good as going to market BEFORE they do

So timing will play a part of the final analysis regardless of how the two match up against each other

The bottom line performance per socket isn't quite as important as many try to claim either, with most hardware being extremely cheap now barring ram you head into territory where intel would need one of their chips to be competitive price wise to 1.5 AMDs even 2 AMD equivalents or more in some cases.

Yet with some chip comparisons its AMD chips that outperform the intel opposition by that sort of margin despite also being significantly cheaper

But of course the energy use and cooling issues also feature, so I think there wont be a definitive "this is better" answer, it will depend on whether heat production, budget, rack space, energy consumption or just raw performance per U of rack space is the overriding factor in a companies decision making process

Then of course there will be the people who will want to change "just because" even if its "slightly" inferior and those who wont change "just because" even if the AMD offering is superior

So its about as predicable across many market sectors as what peoples favourite food or colour would be across an entire country

But I do hope AMD can carve out at least a reasonable market share partly just because its quite admirable how strongly they have come back and I do feel they deserve the rewards for that, but also because without intel having such a strong and uncontested dominance they could (and do) charge whatever the heck they wanted when they were the pimp for the only "ride" in town because outside of a board game a monopoly doesn't favour the customer