Advanced Micro Devices Inc.'s (AMD's) dual-core Opteron processor has enjoyed a significant performance advantage for most of this year over its single-core Xeon competitor from Intel Corp. Intel has released its first dual-core server chip, with another on the way for early next year, but neither of those chips will be superior to Opteron, Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP) managers told users on Tuesday at the HP Technology Forum 2005.

Opteron to keep performance lead in 2006, HP managers say