Ace's Hardware: Dual 1.7GHz Xeon vs Dual 1.2Ghz Athlon MP

[Warren Togami]

High end performance hardware...
Guess which workstation architecture won the majority of benchmarks, and
costs up to $2,000 less?

http://www.aceshardware.com/Spades/read.php?article_id=45000195
"Today, the Dual AMD Athlon 1.2 GHz configuration goes head-to-head with the
Dual Xeon 1.7 GHz power of Compaq's EVO 6000, Dell's Dimension 530 and
Fujitsu-Siemens Celsius 670. But this article is more than a Dual Xeon
versus Dual Athlon comparison, as we search for the best workstation that
can address the needs of the most demanding creative professionals:
computer-aided engineers, designers, digital content creators, game
developers and scientists."

"If you are in the market for a workstation, then you have come to the right
place! We offer you benchmarks on Maya, 3DStudio Max, Cinema 4D, Truespace,
Microstation, AutoCad 2000 (2D and 3D), video encoding, ScienceMark, Visual
C++ and more. We even have a next generation 3D-engine and an advanced Chess
program this time around!"

"The dual AthlonMP wipes the floor with the faster clocked Xeons and is no
less than 31% (!) faster than the best dual Xeon workstations."

"The high clockspeed of the Xeon is not high enough to negate the enormously
high branch misprediction penalty. The program scales very well with more
CPUs, but the dual Athlon is still capable of defeating the quad Xeon
machine."