We can conclude only one thing here: either the working frequencies of the AMD Opteron processor will grow up, or the corresponding applications will finally get optimized for AMD64 technology. Otherwise, the users will have to decide on other processors for rendering tasks.

Performance: Office and Content Creation Applications

To test our systems in regular office applications we used a standard Winstone test set.

This is where a lot of advantages of AMD Opteron processors, such as integrated memory controller and large L2 cache, finally come to light. As a result, Opteron 1.8GHz outperformed Athlon XP 2.2GHz in both tests. Everything indicates that the upcoming Athlon 64 processor family, which is to come into desktop systems, will become a worthy successor to Athlon XP family.