Intel Xeon 1.7GHz: King of the High End?

The Office Productivity suite is much less of a niche application test than the Internet Content Creation suite and also depends much less on memory/FSB bandwidth.  As we noticed in our Pentium 4 1.7GHz Review, the Athlon was able to rise to the top here quite easily. 

In this case, the move to dual processors reduced the average response time by only 11%.  This indicates that in order to notice a performance boost from dual processors the workload must be stressful enough on the cache, memory and front side buses of the processors to truly saturate the CPUs.  The 11% lead here could have been just as easily gained by moving to a single, faster CPU (when available) for a much lower investment. 

What you gain from dual processors really depends on what you are throwing at them.

Again, these results mimic the average response time.  The Pentium 4 (and thus the Xeon) doesn't scale too well in this test, meaning that the 11% improvement provided by going to dual processors here would be very difficult to achieve with higher clocked CPUs.

If this is how you use your computer then you may be better off going AMD on this one.  The Athlon scales much better in this test because of its relatively short pipeline and large caches, allowing it to scale at 69% of the clock speed increase up to 1.33GHz.  Provided that this trend continues uninhibited, the Athlon is clearly the better processor for these sort of tasks while the Xeon and Pentium 4 take the Internet Content Creation category.