Well for high performance systems requiring 4 dimms isn't bad as the tr series has 4 memory controllers.

You don't have to run with 4 DIMMs but you'll run slower if you do; it's kinda like having a one lane road vs a 4 lane road, you can put all your traffic through one lane, but it's a whole lot slower than using four lanes.

That was not the point I was arguing with. Let me qoute.

>AMD should have just not made TR work in this case

Where "this case" is <4 dimms.

Does the equivalent Intel platform suffer to the same degree of performance degradation when not using all 4 memory channels?

For the most part yes, the only sizeable difference is the caching/NUMA strategies and implementation between the two platforms (L3 <=> DRAM controller(s), and interconnects if necessary).