In the server world Intel remains Number 1. AMD may have gained some ground recently on the technological front with its Athlon 64 and Opteron processors, but when large companies look for reliability in their servers, it's Intel solutions they generally turn to. Reputation goes a long way in big business, and Intel is known for rock solid mission-critical data and application performance. The competition's server record has been spotty until recently.

AMD have made quite a stir with the 64-bit Opteron server processor, but the company is still relatively new on the server front and not as battle tested as Intel. Downtime costs tremendous amounts of money, so it is understandable why no one wants to be a pioneer in this particular market.

As we proceed with this review, PCSTATS will be testing a pair of 3.06GHz Intel Xeon processors (socket 604), each sporting 1MB of Level 3 cache memory. The Xeon CPUs we're examining have been built with 0.13 micron process technology, and are based on the 'Gallatin' core which operates with a 533 MHz Front Side Bus (FSB). The Gallatin core is the same die currently being used in another of Intel's darlings, the Pentium 4 Extreme Edition processor. The Pentium 4 EE is a desktop processor with attitude and a 2MB L3 cache. Normal Pentium 4 processors have no level 3 cache memory at all.

The Intel 3.06 GHz Xeon processor is slightly different in appearance from the older socket 603 processor of the same name. If you compare the two processors side by side, you can see that one has the appearance of a Pentium 4 processor soldered to a larger circuit board, while the newer socket 604 server chip is more refined with an array of resistors surrounding the copper heatspreader.

On the flip side, we see the same short fragile pins which are found on the Pentium 4, albeit in a different configuration. Between the socket 604 and socket 603 Xeon processor there may be a difference of 400MHz FSB to 533MHz FSB, but there is only one pin difference. The two CPUs are not interchangeable, and a socket 603 Xeon cannot be used in an socket 604 Xeon motherboard as they are architecturally different.

Intel Xeon 3.06 GHz Processor Features: Engineering Sample CPUs

Spotting and selecting the appropriate Xeon for your tasks is a bit harder now, as there are two models. There's the regular Xeon (aka Xeon DP) that we're reviewing which runs on a 400 MHz or 533 MHz FSB, has L2 cache sizes from 256KB to 512KB and L3 from 1MB to 2MB. Intel also recently introduced its new Xeon MP line of processors which allow for the standard single and dual processor operation, but also 4-way and 8-way as well. The Xeon MP only runs on a 400 MHz FSB but has L3 cache sizes.

Xeon Process Comparison CPU Speeds FSB L3 Cache Intel Xeon DP Up to 3.2 GHz 400, 533 MHz 512KB, 1MB, 2MB Intel Xeon MP Up to 3 GHz 400 MHz 512KB, 1MB, 2MB, 4MB

All Xeon are based on the same Pentium 4 architecture. The only things that separate them are the speed that their Front Side Bus operates at, their cache size and the number of processors that can be used together on a single server motherboard.