Workstation showdown: Xeon vs. Opteron

In business, dual-processor workstations are the trucks of desktop computing. Pickups aren't very glamorous, but when you need to move lots of stuff from one point to another efficiently, glamour isn't the point. You need a truck.

Sure, you can get computers that are snazzier, have faster clock rates, and sport cool accessories, but as fast as they may go, they can only do one thing well at a time. These dual-processor workstations are designed to perform many processes at the same time and to work quickly and efficiently.

For this reason, we were intrigued when IBM offered up its new dual-Opteron IntelliStation A Pro workstation for a test. The hype on the street had been singing the Opteron's praises for some time. According to its proponents, the Opteron was the greatest thing since night baseball; curmudgeons that we are (though we do like night baseball), we weren't so sure.

So we decided to pit the Opteron against its primary rival, Intel's tried and true Xeon. We asked MPC to send over the workstation version of its NetFrame 600. This platform, designed initially as a server, can be ordered in a workstation version with a high-end video card and an attractive beige case.

The NF 600 sports two 3.2GHz Xeons, a gig of memory, and some very fast SATA hard disks. This matched nicely with IBM's SATA drives, although the IBM A Pro had 4GB of memory.

Then, just to push the truck comparison one step further, we purchased a refurbished Hewlett-Packard xw8000 workstation with a pair of 3.06GHz Xeon processors, an ATA drive, and a gig of memory. After all, sometimes your best deal is to pick a used truck at the dealer if you need the capability and want to save a ton of money.

Load 'Em Up

Once we had the workstations in-house, we ran a series of tests simulating a real-world work environment and then testing the machines for their absolute best multitasking performance.

In the first series, we loaded up each machine with the full suite of commercial applications you'd expect to see used in the financial services or the content-production industries. This test included the full install of Microsoft Office 2003, Adobe Photoshop, and Premier Pro 1.5. We also installed Symantec's Norton AntiVirus 2004. We used the workstations to move through a defined set of tasks in manipulating still images and then in producing a movie starting with an original digital video. We timed processing wherever possible (these machines are so fast that Photoshop works with no discernable delay).

In the second test, we loaded CSA Research's OfficeBench test tool. Someone actually using these workstations would never have a completely clean environment, so we ran a test series with everything installed and Norton AntiVirus running. (We also ran OfficeBench on the clean systems.)

Next, we loaded up another CSA Research tool, Clarity Studio. With Clarity Studio, we simulated multiple, concurrent workloads running in parallel -- the kind of complex, data-intensive multitasking that's becoming commonplace in emerging workstation markets (see "How we put the workstations under pressure").