why?

If your buying new gear why might you want to buy the 6-core systems instead of the upcoming 8-core systems? Or better yet upcoming 8 and 12 core AMD systems?

I can understand if your really tight on capacity perhaps on existing 5500 systems you may want to switch out the CPUs(may not be worth it unless you find a way to get credit for the CPUs or re-sell them to someone else), but really don't see the point in going with 5600 otherwise.

Maybe upgrading from 5500 to 5600 in a year or so may make more $$ sense.

For some reason, Intel used the SPEC_int_rate2006 test

Erm, could that reason be that the integer test allows Intel to use almost all of the non clock speed impacting power management features in the processor and turn off much of the core (very much enhanced in recent versions of their silicon). The SPEC Integer test is not going to work much of actual core real estate or memory I/O due to its nature. Of course if they ran a mixed workload benchmark there would be a lot more core turned on and much more happening in memory I/O (yes that uses more power than just keeping the RAM refreshed). So, the "some reason" will be that it is the benchmark that gave the best comparison between the old and new processor designs.

Re: Imitation is the most sincere form of flattery

If you put it into the server chips, you start to make it more attractive to do your load balancing with nice cheap servers, rather than buying expensive black boxes from the aforementioned vendors.

If you want it on the desktop, buy a Core i5 (or a i7-980X).

Via may have had acceleration for a while, but Intel chips were probably still faster even without.

Re: why?

The 8-core chips from Intel aren't entirely comparable. (aka Beckton, Nehalem-EX or Xeon 7500)

They're more akin to being a pair of 5500s in a single package. So they don't have all the architectural advantages of the 5600s.The other main difference is they use different sockets. 5600s go into boards that only take 2 processors, Beckton will go into 4-way and above.

More to encryption than bit-twiddling

If off-board crypto gear is done away with, where do the random numbers for session keys come from? VIA provides these in the CPU, Intel doesn't. Presumably there will be a future Intel chipset with a random number generator, but until then most designs which currently run off-board cryptography will need to retain it, at the very least as a robust source of random numbers.

Touting a fast processor for virtualisation makes me look to the see if the chipsets support the sort of massive I/O required to run the CPUs at full tilt. As your SAP results suggest, the architecture is limited by I/O throughput.