Intel Xeon 1.7GHz: King of the High End?

High-End Workstation Performance

Our next set of tests bring us to Ziff Davis' Dual Processor Inspection Tests that were a part of High-End Winstone 99.  These tests were composed of three applications, MicroStation SE (CAD), Photoshop 4.0 (image editing), and Visual C++ (development), all of which were specifically designed with MP support in mind.  This should give us a good idea of how well a dual Xeon configuration can perform in a situation where the applications that you're running are specifically designed for use with multiple processors.

Microstation SE is a CAD/modeling package that is extremely FPU intensive.  We have already seen indications that the FPU on Xeon (and Pentium 4) is quite poor in executing unoptimized x87 instruction code which is definitely present in the MicroStation SE test.  This allows the Athlon, with its extremely powerful FPU; to not only dominate the single processor Xeon but the dual processor Xeon and Pentium IIIs. 

Even the Dual Pentium III 933 is able to edge out the dual Xeon 1.7 because of the fact that it is stronger at unoptimized x87 calculations which compose most of today's FP intensive applications.  In order for the Xeon to succeed here, applications must take advantage of the SSE2 instructions supported by the Xeon.

The picture changes dramatically in the Photoshop test.  The most noticeable thing being that, just moving to dual processors allows the Xeon to enjoy a 46% performance boost. 

A 58% increase in performance can be seen under Visual C++.  Quite impressive.

Once again, when looking at the overall picture, the performance improvement the Xeon takes home is on average a little over 26% when using dual processors.  Just as was the case with SYSMark 2001, this figure is watered down considerably by the one test that did poorly on the Xeon.  We can only show you how the setup will perform in the various tests, it is up to you to decide what tests resemble the applications/patterns in which you use your computer.