The Final Word With the introduction of the latest Xeon 3.06/1MB processor, along with massive price cuts to the rest of the Xeon family, Intel is obviously turning up the heat in the workstation environment. We think that it's quite clear this is one of Intel's pre-emptive strikes against the upcoming Opteron processor for workstations and low-end servers. While the Opteron has proved itself a viable competitor in the server and database departments, it has yet to prove itself in the workstation market, due to the lack of any true workstation chipsets.
Intel now has a superb performing processor in its arsenal which can basically match the level of performance of AMD's Opteron at the same price points, and already has an array of chipsets and motherboards already for sale. The Xeon solutions are proven to be stable and perform well in real-world situations, while the Opteron has not yet had a chance to really crack into this market yet. It's certainly going to see how well these two processors shape up in the next month, as workstation-class platforms based on the AMD-8000 and nVidia nForce3 chipsets for the Opteron show up, along with a rumored 2.0 GHz Opteron processor on the horizon.
The additional L3 cache of the Xeon 3.06/1MB certainly helps in workstation applications, and we would bet that in server environments the extra cache may help even more than what we've seen here today. In our benchmark suite, we saw up to a 10% performance boost in real-world applications over the 3.06 GHz with no L3 cache. Honestly, L3 cache has been hit or miss on previous processor launches, as some have questions its viability to effectively improve performance. With this Xeon, we can certainly see that it improves performance across the board. Than again, if your applications aren't heavy on cache usage, you may not see any improvement at all. The additional L3 cache, along with the Xeon's Hyper-Threading technology should also improve multi-tasking performance by quite a bit.
Is the extra cache worth the price? Well, while the processors are just getting ready to hit the market in good quantities, it appears that the extra L3 cache of this new Xeon can cost anywhere from $200 - $250 per processor over the standard 3.06 GHz Xeon with no L3 cache. That's quite a hefty price tag, but since this is Intel's top of the line workstation processor, it's also tagged with the usual Intel price premium for their top of the line components. It's a hard-sell, considering Intel's standard Xeon chips just took a massive price-drop and are looking more attractive than ever. As a workstation user, it would be hard for me to justify the extra money for the performance gain at this time, although if you want the top of the line for the workstation market, this would be our choice at this time.
Slaughtered is right! And as another poster pointed out, workstation benchmarks should have used the new 1Meg L3 Xeon for a true comparison. What a complete blowout that would have been!
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