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The Final Word
Both the Prestonia Xeon and Athlon MP are incredible processors, and both engineering teams deserve a round of kudos for producing some incredibly fast SMP-capable CPU's. Each CPU has a specific area where you'll see one dominate over the other, although the majority of the tests were fairly close between the two CPU's.
In my opinion, the Prestonia Xeon is the better CPU of the two for mission critical / server applications. The Intel 860 platform seems to be incredibly stable, considering it’s relatively short time on the market. Not one instance comes to mind where we ran into compatibility issues with our Dual Xeon systems, something we can’t say for the Athlon MP systems we setup. Unfortunately, you pay the price for the Intel name, as Xeon systems are extremely expensive. The CPU’s and motherboards are both extremely expensive, which makes the Xeon hard to recommend for the workstation market.
The workstation market is much better suited by the Athlon MP processor, as its price / performance ratio is unbeatable. For most workstation applications, the Athlon MP even will be a better performer, despite its lower price tag. We would love to see AMD put a few more server-specific features on their MP processors to justify their heightened price tags over the Athlon XP, but even as they are now, the MP’s are a great deal for the amount of processing power you get in that tiny little core.
As for the Xeon’s Hyperthreading technologies, it’s hard not to be disappointed with the scores which we got throughout our testing. Hyperthreading sounds like an incredibly useful processor feature in theory, but in practice, it’s useless without compatible software on the market. Time will only tell if developers want to take on the Hyperthreading challenge, and the few developers we’ve talked to have not been that incredibly impressed with the technology thus far. If nothing else, Hyperthreading will certainly be an interesting to watch out for over the next few years.
This time next year, it's quite possible that we may be dealing with McKinley and Clawhammer as the workstation processors of choice, if Intel and AMD have their way. While it's anyone's guess if 64-bit processing is ready to come down to the consumer level, this article certainly proves that current 32-bit processors have more than enough power to handle today's applications."
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First off, it's quite easy to see that the dual Athlon MP setup simply rules the roost when it comes to raw CPU performance. Even with the Athlon MP chips at 1.6 GHz, it's easily able to outpace the dual Xeon 2.0 GHz processors, with or without Hyperthreading enabled. Even the highest performing Xeon setup still trails the dual Athlon MP 1900+ by roughly 30%.
When Hyperthreading was enabled, we can certainly see some performance gains being had by the Xeon setups. One CPU with Hyperthreading gained 18% in this benchmark, while two CPU's with Hyperthreading gained 23%. Of course, this is simply a synthetic test, and to achieve any real world performance gains like this, the software would have to be specifically optimized for Hyperthreading.
Upon looking at the results, we're not positive on what effect the SMT test has on our scores. As you can see by the first graph, even with Hyperthreading (hardware)disabled on the dual 2.0 GHz Xeons, it still managed to get a higher score on the Hyperthreading (software) test, compared with Hyperthreading (software) being disabled, which nearly has a margin of 2000.
In terms of memory performance, Xeon systems still maintain quite a large margin over the current Athlon MP systems. Thanks to the Xeon / i860 dual channel RDRAM memory interface, you've got quite a bit more available bandwidth compared to the Athlon MP / 760MPX single channel DDR interface.
Good news is it seems stable.
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