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Technology Stocks : Intel Corporation (INTC) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: RealMuLan who wrote (174027)	4/8/2003 2:50:30 PM
From: The Duke of URL©	Respond to of 186894

Great litle article: from InfoWorld test center: Xeon vs. Xeon By Alan Zeichick Xeon has been the trade name used by Intel to distinguish its high-end 32-bit processors, targeted at technical workstations and servers from its desktop- and notebook-oriented Pentium 4 processors. Beginning in November 2001, Intel bifurcated its Xeon lineup into separate product lines. Xeon DP (dual processing) is designed for lower-end systems with one or two CPUs, and Xeon MP (multiprocessing) is designed for systems with more than two processors. The differentiation is more than marketing fluff. The Xeon DP is almost identical to an ordinary Pentium 4 processor. Both come in speeds up to 3.06GHz, have L2 (Level 2) caches of either 256KB or 512KB, and both have a front-side bus that runs at either 400MHz or 533MHz. Those buses move data at 3.2GBps or 4.3GBps, respectively. The L2 cache, in both the Xeon DP and Pentium 4 processors, holds data retrieved from main memory. The much-smaller L1 cache, which is inside the chip's execution core and maintains the processor pipeline, grabs its data at high speed from the L2 cache. The front-side bus is what connects the L2 cache with main memory. The Xeon MP processor is a horse of a different color. This processor, which currently tops out at 2GHz, introduces a new Layer 3 cache that ranges from 512KB to 2MB in size. The Xeon MP's L1 cache still grabs data from the L2 cache, but the L2 pulls from the fast L3 cache, instead of from slow main memory. According to Intel's technical documentation, moving data from the L3 cache to the L2 cache is 10 times to 30 times faster than fetching from main memory. If data isn't in the Xeon MP's L3 cache, of course, the processor will need to load it from main memory using the chip's 400MHz front-side bus. Another small but important distinction: Current chipsets allow a maximum of 16GB RAM for Xeon DP systems and 64GB RAM for Xeon MP. Andrew Binstock, principal analyst at Pacific Data Works in San Carlos, Calif. , believes that the Xeon MP processor is best when it can leverage that beefy cache. Suitable applications include memory-intensive software such as relational databases, as well as those that use a lot of separate threads, such as heavily laden applications servers. By contrast, the faster Xeon DP would be better at computationally intensive tasks, such as on a video server or compile/builder server, where its faster clock speed and front-side bus provide the advantage. Alan Zeichick is principal technology analyst at Camden Associates in San Bruno, Calif., which specializes in networking and software development. Reach him at zeichick@camdenassociates.com.