Though we previously focussed our
information on the mainstream home and business PC workstation class of
CPU's, Intel's Xeon line of CPU's has
now been included in the CPU Scorecard
list. The Xeon line is marketed
primarily toward higher end servers and multiprocessor environments in
competition with DEC's Alpha and Sun's UltraSparc processors.
Unfortunately, there is little benchmarking information available
comparing Xeon's with the mainstream
lines of CPU's. This is not helped by the fact that Xeon's
are available in several different on-board cache configurations, making
general comparisons dubious at best.
Roughly speaking, however, the Pentium-II Xeon's
will score somewhere between a Pentium-II
and a Pentium-III at the same rated
clockspeed. The Xeon-III's will score
slightly faster than their Pentium-III
cousins. Intel, however, charges a premium for their Xeon's,
as they are held to a much higher reliability standard of performance
demanded by mission-critical server applications.
AMD's K7 CPU, due out in June, is
touted to be able to compete against Intel's Xeon
line in server applications. When it is finally released, you will most
likely see both K7's and Xeons
on the CPU Scorecard as these sumo's square
off.
