This has been going on for a while. AMD is more cost effective and Intel has more features and raw power. honestly I would go AMD for my file server if the boards had the same features as their Intel counterparts. To simply take care of my precious data I don't need much horse power. What I do need is IPMI, Intel NICs and so on. When I was browsing for my last server board I didn't see a single Supermicro AMD board with IPMI. When the term "competitive" is used we must look beyond computational power. I don't need a 4 core/8 thread CPU for my server, even though it does more than just run WHS. What I do need is ECC and a boat load of other things that only come on server motherboards and only for powerful Xeons under Intel. Personally I'm very interested in what the new AMD server lineup will look like. Next winter is when I'm due for my next real upgrade. I'll be replacing my encoding machine with a Q6600 for some DP board. What happens this summer/fall is pretty important. Sandy Bridge seems to be little more than a Nehalem revision. Clock for clock there isn't much of an improvement. AMD could do some spectacular things in the coming months.