Review of Intel's newest XEON processors - code named "Prestonia"

Wow. It certainly has been an exciting week thus far when you consider how many introductions took place in one day (and it's only Monday!). We've seen the very latest in desktop processors from both Intel and AMD. We've also seen some very nice looking new products from Apple in MacWorld. On top of it all, it snowed here in NYC. But, in the midst of all of this, there are some rumblings over another chip from Intel - codenamed "Prestonia". I wrote a small initial review on 1/4/2001 and today, I'm going to spend some time revisiting these CPUs as well as give some updated benchmarks.

I've been into dual (and four way) processor based machines ever since I started to develop software server side applications. My previous work had been in games and 3D graphics but for the last few years, I've been primarily concerned about how to utilize as much horsepower from as many CPUs as possible. With my workstations at work being dual processor systems and my test and production servers 4 way boxes, I wanted to put together a fairly reasonable dual processor machine for home usage. My first couple of passes involved putting together a Dual Pentium III Socket 370 coupled with a VIA ApolloPro 266 chipset. The end results were mixed. My initial iWill DVD266 board wasn't the best but my SuperMicro 370DDE system wasn't bad. However, with nearly 8 months of using the VIA chipset, I finally decided to ditch it in favor of a Pentium 4 based system and an Intel chipset. Now I know there are plenty of people out there who have had no problems with VIA chipsets and that's awesome. For my dual processor needs however, I decided to stick with an Intel made chipset for now. So my new Pentium 4 based machine would be based on the XEON branded processors which were socket 603, SMP enabled Pentium 4's using the Intel i860 chipset.

My initial processors were Intel XEON 1.7 GHz processors (code named "Foster"). However, 3 weeks later through members within 2cpu.com, I became aware of the fact that the Prestonia's were already available for sale through OEM channels and I quickly jumped on them to replace my new 1.7 XEONs. Thus, this is how we ended up here today.

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