Intel Xeon 1.7GHz: King of the High End?

The important thing to take away from the above two bandwidth tests is that the Dual Xeon 1.7GHz has no more memory bandwidth than a single processor Xeon running at the same speed.  This unfortunately means that as clock speeds increase, a dual processor Xeon system will experience memory bandwidth limitations quicker than a single processor Xeon (or Pentium 4) system.

Another interesting thing to note is that the Dual Pentium III setup has the least amount of memory bandwidth of all four configurations; even less than the single processor Athlon.  This combined with the 1GB/s of bandwidth available to its FSB makes the dual processor Pentium III and Pentium III Xeon easily bottlenecked.