TomsHardware reviews AMD's Opteron 250 and Intel's Xeon 3.6ghz
For a long time, the workstation sector was stagnating. Now, Intel's Xeon, code-named Nocona, has finally found its way into the retail channels four months after its unveiling. While the device offers a 3.6 GHz clock speed and a technically sophisticated platform, numerous difficulties held back its commercial launch, including an unusual number of steppings that crept into the chipsets.
But all's well that ends well: the Xeon, based on a 90-nm process, and its workstation chipset the E7525/Tumwater, is expected to offer superior performance compared to competing workstation processors. Of course, when we say "competing products," we mean the Opteron, which AMD has had available with speeds up to 2.4 GHz in the form of the Opteron 250 since the beginning of the summer.
With out a doubt, Intel pulled out all the stops to upgrade the new platform. As a result, significant ingredients have been added, which are already spiking the desktop platform based on socket 775, such as PCI Express graphics and DDR2 memory. However, the latter only works with 200 MHz (DDR2-400); DDR333 can be used as an option. A new PCI-X hub called 6700PXH now provides new bus segments for up to 133 MHz - until now the discriminating customer had to rely on chipsets from the competition...
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