CADALYST - Speed x 2: Xi MTower 2P64

CADALYST - Speed x 2: Xi MTower 2P64:

"Anyone with lingering doubts about using AMD microprocessors in the engineering workplace need look no further than the AutoCAD 2004 performance scores of the Xi MTower 2P64, which is based on dual AMD Opteron 64-bit 246 processors. The Cadalyst C2001 AutoCAD scores are not only the highest we’ve ever obtained, they’re 11.63 points (about 10%) ahead of the nearest competitor, the Polywell PolyStation 940X4. It is this kind of performance that gives the Xi MTower 2P64 a Highly Recommended rating—all to itself this time. However, the Maxbench 4 benchmarks were only marginally faster than other scores. The ViewPerf proe-01 test results were marginally, though not significantly, slower than those of other systems in this roundup.

Opteron delivers workstation performance leadership: "It should be pointed out that the winning Opteron system was somewhat hobbled. It currently isn't the best Opteron workstation system available. The victorious system was configured with an Arima HDAMB motherboard (4 DIMM slots), which only had one of its two processors directly connected to memory. The other processor connects to memory via its twin sibling. This is called a 4 0 setup, as the second processor doesn't have its own dedicated memory. So that not only cuts the memory bandwidth in half, it also adds undesired memory latency that the second processor has to live with. But even with those handicaps, which many have criticized on message boards, it was still the best performing workstation."