Intel Dual-Core Xeon Performance Unveiled

by Yaroslav Lyssenko

[ 10/26/2005 | 10:05 AM ]

For many years Intel Xeon family microprocessors have been dominating server and workstation markets in terms of performance and availability. Intel’s Hyper-Threading ensured sufficient aid in highly-parallelized environments providing additional performance-per-core. The recent update to the Intel Xeon lineup of central processing units (CPUs) includes dual-core products, which are supposed to provide additional benefits thanks to the second core in addition to multi-threading. The question is: how much additional performance does the second core bring? In order to answer this question GamePC web-site has benchmarked two Intel Xeon 2.80GHz  CPUs.

“It’s taken far longer than expected, but Intel is finally striking back with a dual-core product of its own, codenamed ‘Paxville’. Intel’s ‘Paxville’ Xeon design essentially shoves two single-core processor cores, each with 2 MB of on-die cache, on to a single Socket-604 package. Much like the dual-core Opteron, dual-core Xeon processors are able to plug into a Socket-604 dual-processor motherboard to allow for quad-core processing with only two physical processors. Not only this, but when you throw Hyper-Threading in to the mix, you essentially double that, allowing for eight virtual processors to be seen by the operating system. Certainly sounds exciting, although most people seem (rightly) skeptical of this new design,” writes GamePC.

The new dual-core Xeon processor 2.80GHz is based on the core known as Paxville, which has 2MB of level-two cache per core and is produced using 90nm process technology. Each Intel Xeon processor with two processing engines will be able to execute up to four threads, as each of the cores supportы the Hyper-Threading technology. The new Xeon processors naturally support 64-bit capability, execute disable (EDB) functionality, demand-based switching (DBS) power consumption regulations and other technologies found in the current Xeon platforms.

As multi-core architectures become more widespread, software developers begin to write multi-threaded applications capable of utilizing the performance provided by dual-core microprocessors. Applications for servers and workstations have been designed with multiple simultaneous parallel calculations in mind for a long time, but many programs still do not take advantage of multi-threading.

“Intel’s “Paxville” Dual Core Xeon processors can provide a much needed performance boost in applications which are designed to take advantage of a lot of processors and run a lot of simultaneous threads. Namely, server and high-end workstation class applications. In applications which can fully make use of its abilities, these new Xeon processors can push some solid performance numbers and crunch through code fairly fast. The amount of processing power with two of these Xeons is pretty impressive; however, all this processing power does come at a cost. Intel’s new dual-core Xeon consumes the most power of any processors we’ve seen to date, and also runs exceedingly hot, both negative qualities for a processor which is designed for the server space. In addition, the chip is also not compatible with older Socket-604 platforms, meaning you will have to drop an additional $400-$500 on a new dual-core Xeon compatible platform,” concludes the author.

• GamePC: Intel “Paxville” Dual Core Xeon and the Asus PVL-D Intel E7520.