Actually, my home system is pretty much what Indy described. No wonder I started big time to play with virtualization.
Both of the servers in my office are AMDs, but I have been an AMD fan for a long time. Don't get me wrong, Intel has some of the faster machines. But the price point on AMD nowadays makes it more practical for the lower end.
Thought you were sporting AMD, but didn't want to put you out there.
For 1 or 2 socket servers, especially if you are doing virtualization [highly multi-threaded as Sandeep brings up] The latest generation of 16-core processors are impressive @ ~$540 per processor.
http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+Opteron+6272
