AMQP does have extra capabilities and is a good messaging system and has advanced routing features, but you need to learn what exchanges, queues and bindings are and how they relate before it is useful.

I've used rabbit in production on multiple systems and it is still running on some of those. But I have switched to redis for most of my messaging needs because of the built in data structures and persistence. It makes it a much more versatile server and it is much easier to admin and much more stable. Rabbit is too easy to push over when you run it out of memory.

But I had to chime in and refute your 100k messages per core on rabbit. 20k maybe with the java client, more like 5-7k with a ruby or python client.

I can still get 80k/sec with a ruby client on redis.

The two servers are very different, redis is a swiss army knife of data structures over the network, that is why it is so useful. AMQP and rabbit are targeted more at enterprise messaging and integration where raw speed doesn't matter as much as complex hierarchies of brokers and middleware.